[R] Firefox not showing R help.

[Duncan Murdoch]

On 28/02/2015 4:10 PM, Rolf Turner wrote:
> 
> Firefox recently updated itself on my laptop.  Now when I ask for R help 
> --- e.g. ?plot --- I just get my home page. And no help. If I do "?plot" 
> again after Firefox has opened its window, I just get yet another 
> Firefox window, opened to my home page.  (I have my preferences set to
> 
>      "When Firefox starts Show my homepage"
> 
> --- as I always have had in the past.)

I would guess that browseURL() won't work for any URL.  Is that right?

What does getOption("browser") give you in R?  If it is just a character
string (e.g. "xdg-open" is what I get in Ubuntu), does it work from your
command line, outside of R, e.g. for me that test would be

xdg-open http://www.r-project.org

If that doesn't work, but you can figure out a command line way to open
a particular URL, change getOption("browser") to use that.

Duncan Murdoch

> 
> The Firefox that I am currently running is (according Firefox help
> --> "About Firefox") is version 36.0.
> 
> Can anyone suggest to me how I can get my html R help back?
> 
> For what it's worth:  I am using Linux, Fedora 17.  (Yes, I know it's 
> elderly, but then so am I. :-) )
> 
> Also in case it has any relevance:
> 
>>> sessionInfo()
>> R version 3.1.2 (2014-10-31)
>> Platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit)
>>
>> locale:
>>  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_NZ.utf8       LC_NUMERIC=C
>>  [3] LC_TIME=en_NZ.utf8        LC_COLLATE=en_NZ.utf8
>>  [5] LC_MONETARY=en_NZ.utf8    LC_MESSAGES=en_NZ.utf8
>>  [7] LC_PAPER=en_NZ.utf8       LC_NAME=C
>>  [9] LC_ADDRESS=C              LC_TELEPHONE=C
>> [11] LC_MEASUREMENT=en_NZ.utf8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C
>>
>> attached base packages:
>> [1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base
>>
>> other attached packages:
>> [1] spatstat_1.40-0.064 misc_0.0-16
>>
>> loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
>>  [1] abind_1.4-0     deldir_0.1-7    goftest_1.0-2   grid_3.1.2
>>  [5] lattice_0.20-29 Matrix_1.1-4    mgcv_1.8-3      nlme_3.1-118
>>  [9] polyclip_1.3-1  tensor_1.5      tools_3.1.2
> 
> cheers,
> 
> Rolf Turner
>