Help viewer not working when Session Watcher enabled over Remote SSH

Describe the bug I’ve been using this excellent extension for several weeks now and love the features. I use it both locally and via Remote-SSH session. As of today however, when running over Remote SSH, I am unable to view help when session watcher is enabled. This feature worked previously (used it last week sometime).

If I start an R session without session watcher, and type something like ??magrittr I will see the plain text documentation in my R session. With session watcher enabled, typing ??magrittr outputs:

> ??magrittr
starting httpd help server ... done

And opens a new tab in VSCode, but the contents of the window are blank. If I run wget http://127.0.0.1… (URL in the newly opened window), I get an html file that I can then open in VSCode.

Have reverted all settings to default but still not working. Running extension version 1.4.3 and tried downgrading to 1.4.2 but same result.

Not sure if this is related, but plots still render fine.

To Reproduce Steps to reproduce the behavior - see above.

Do you want to fix by self? (I hope your help!)

Yes

Happy to help, just not sure how to debug.

Expected behavior Requesting help in R session should open rendered html view in a new tab.

Environment (please complete the following information):

• OS: macOS Remote -SSH to Linux host
• VSCode Version: 1.47.0
• R Version: 3.6.3
• vscode-R version: 1.4.3

[renkun-ken]

@jonnybaik https://github.com/microsoft/vscode/issues/102449 is the issue to track this bug introduced in an earlier version of vscode. Hopefully it will be resolved in Oct 2020 release. In fact, it is postponed several times already.

[renkun-ken]

I could reproduce this as you described. It looks like VSCode has something changed in the recent version.

I tried and manage to get it work by running

options(vsc.browser=FALSE)
?get
options(vsc.browser="Active")
?get

Then the webview works properly. I’ll take a closer look at what makes the initial attempt fail.

This issue seems to occur with all WebView created from calling browser where an iframe is embedded into the browser, including the shiny app under Remote SSH environment:

shiny::runExample("01_hello")