It seems that if there is no CSS styling applied to the given canvas element, Vgr_htmlc can cause the canvas to grow with every redraw when ~resize:false. I'm not sure how much of a real-world problem this is considering users would be expected to always have styling, but I noticed this while developing on a minimalist web page. Adding CSS height and width styles fixed it for me.
I think an additional warning in the docs would probably be sufficient if there is not a better fix available.