Creating a dot diagram for Word: Knitr hangs long and terminates with Chrome error

[dmenne]

Bug description

Last February, creating GraphViz diagrams for Word documents worked.

Trying to recreated the report in February 2025, no workaround for Word could be found.

Caveat: Everything works fine for HTML output, so this is no code error.

Steps to reproduce

• Create a standard skeleton book project for Quarto
• Use this in _quarto.yml

format:
  docx:
    output-ext: "docx"
  html:
    fig-height: 4
    fig-width: 5

In index.qmd:

  ```{dot}
  graph G {
    layout=neato
    run -- intr;
    intr -- runbl;
    runbl -- run;
    run -- kernel;
    kernel -- zombie;
    kernel -- sleep;
    kernel -- runmem;
    sleep -- swap;
    swap -- runswap;
    runswap -- new;
    runswap -- runmem;
    new -- runmem;
    sleep -- runmem;
  }

• Build for HTML: Expected behaviour shows graph

Expected behavior

• For Word, create graph

Actual behavior

Knitting hangs about 4 Minutes, then:

ERROR: Couldn't find open server.
Chrome process error: Old Headless mode has been removed from the Chrome binary. Please use the new Headless mode (https://developer.chrome.com/docs/chromium/new-headless) or the chrome-headless-shell which is a standalone implementation of the old Headless mode (https://developer.chrome.com/blog/chrome-headless-shell).

Your environment

• RStudio 2024.12.0+467 "Kousa Dogwood" Release (cf37a3e5488c937207f992226d255be71f5e3f41, 2024-12-11) for windows
  Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) RStudio/2024.12.0+467 Chrome/126.0.6478.234 Electron/31.7.6 Safari/537.36, Quarto 1.6.40 (C:/Users/Dieter/AppData/Local/Programs/Quarto/bin/quarto.exe)
• Windows 11

Quarto check output

Quarto 1.6.40
[>] Checking environment information...
      Quarto cache location: C:\Users\Dieter\AppData\Local\quarto
[>] Checking versions of quarto binary dependencies...
      Pandoc version 3.4.0: OK
      Dart Sass version 1.70.0: OK
      Deno version 1.46.3: OK
      Typst version 0.11.0: OK
[>] Checking versions of quarto dependencies......OK
[>] Checking Quarto installation......OK
      Version: 1.6.40
      Path: C:\Users\Dieter\AppData\Local\Programs\Quarto\bin
      CodePage: 1252

[>] Checking tools....................OK
      TinyTeX: v2025.02
      Chromium: (not installed)

[>] Checking LaTeX....................OK
      Using: TinyTex
      Path: C:\Users\Dieter\AppData\Roaming\TinyTeX\bin\windows\
      Version: 2024

[>] Checking basic markdown render....OK

[>] Checking Python 3 installation....OK
      Version: 3.13.1
      Path: C:/Users/Dieter/AppData/Local/Programs/Python/Python313/python.exe
      Jupyter: 5.7.2
      Kernels: env, python3

[mcanouil]

This is a duplicate of several other issues and discussions:

• https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/issues?q=Chrome%20process%20error%3A%20Old%20Headless%20mode%20has%20been%20removed
• https://github.com/quarto-dev/quarto-cli/discussions?discussions_q=Chrome+process+error%3A+Old+Headless+mode+has+been+removed+

The easiest way is to upgrade Quarto to 1.7.13 pre-release which account for chromium-based browser internal changes.

[cderv]

The easiest way is to upgrade Quarto to 1.7.13 pre-release which account for chromium-based browser internal changes.

FWIW next patch release 1.6.41 should have a fix for this too

• Backport #11885 from quarto-dev/chrome-headless #12076