Unable to open URL using RSelenium with Selenium Standalone Server

Question

I'm trying to scrape US census data using RSelenium in RStudio but I'm having trouble navigating to a URL using Chrome browser.

I already have the Selenium Standalone Server running and the chrome driver setup as environment variable in system settings.

As a minimum working example, I'm able to implement the following commands:

> library(RSelenium)
> remDr <- remoteDriver(browserName = "chrome")
> remDr$open()

Running the last command gives me the following output:

[1] "Connecting to remote server"
$applicationCacheEnabled
[1] FALSE

$rotatable
[1] FALSE

$chrome
$chrome$userDataDir
[1] "C:\\Users\\rchoksi\\AppData\\Local\\Temp\\scoped_dir5908_26290"


$takesHeapSnapshot
[1] TRUE

$databaseEnabled
[1] FALSE

$handlesAlerts
[1] TRUE

$version
[1] "61.0.3163.79"

$platform
[1] "Windows NT"

$browserConnectionEnabled
[1] FALSE

$nativeEvents
[1] TRUE

$acceptSslCerts
[1] TRUE

$locationContextEnabled
[1] TRUE

$webStorageEnabled
[1] TRUE

$browserName
[1] "chrome"

$takesScreenshot
[1] TRUE

$javascriptEnabled
[1] TRUE

$cssSelectorsEnabled
[1] TRUE

$id
[1] "f28c4373e6063f797904f3e4a890d02b"

I believe the 'browserConnectionEnabled' property which is set to FALSE is creating the problem, but I may be wrong.

On running the following command, I get an error which is shown below.

> remDr$navigate("https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml")

Selenium message:unknown error: Runtime.executionContextCreated has invalid 'context': {"auxData":{"frameId":"5972.1","isDefault":true},"id":1,"name":"","origin":"://"}
  (Session info: chrome=61.0.3163.79)
  (Driver info: chromedriver=2.9.248315,platform=Windows NT 6.1 SP1 x86_64)

Error:   Summary: UnknownError
     Detail: An unknown server-side error occurred while processing the command.
     Further Details: run errorDetails method

The session info is as shown below:

R version 3.4.0 (2017-04-21)
Platform: x86_64-w64-mingw32/x64 (64-bit)
Running under: Windows 7 x64 (build 7601) Service Pack 1

Matrix products: default

locale:
[1] LC_COLLATE=English_United States.1252 
[2] LC_CTYPE=English_United States.1252   
[3] LC_MONETARY=English_United States.1252
[4] LC_NUMERIC=C                          
[5] LC_TIME=English_United States.1252    

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base     

other attached packages:
[1] RSelenium_1.7.3

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
 [1] httr_1.3.1       compiler_3.4.0   R6_2.2.2         assertthat_0.2.0
 [5] tools_3.4.0      wdman_0.2.2      binman_0.1.0     curl_2.8.1      
 [9] Rcpp_0.12.12     jsonlite_1.5     caTools_1.17.1   openssl_0.9.7   
[13] bitops_1.0-6     semver_0.2.0     XML_3.98-1.9

Any pointers on how to overcome this issue or suggestions for any other tools to implement the same will be appreciated.