VNC Viewer for Google Chrome

[kzahel]

Weird, looking at the manifest, I see it asks for permission for "socket": [ "tcp-connect::" ], but when I try to use that in my own app, I get the message "socket" permissions are only allowed for packaged apps.

I am quite frustrated by the confusing mix of extensions vs "legacy" apps vs "hosted" apps vs the newfangled "packaged" apps. The chrome web store is extremely confusing and the documentation is all over the place.

[est]

Hosted app: basically an external website with more permissions, must by used online

Packaged app: Can be used offline with permissions like a native local app. Think of IPA or APK files.

[Andrex]

It's not that confusing, the only confusing thing IMO is the split between hosted and packaged. I'd rather the CWS only allow packaged apps.

[dm2]

What are the advantages of this over Chrome Remote Desktop from Google?

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-remote-desk...

[ithkuil]

This works with legacy vnc servers

[donniezazen]

It works seamlessly with your Google Account. I gave it a try and it works very well. I couldn't even tell if I was on my Ubuntu box or Chromebook.

[doppenhe]

ive been using CRD for a while... fantastic.

[patrickk]

An alternative is Teamviewer- http://www.teamviewer.com/

I've found it excellent. Free for non-commercial use.

[brittohalloran]

Recently switched to join.me and I'm loving it. Easier for the inept person you're helping to get started.

Also, if you're using it for remote presentations, all you do is email a link and they can see your screen directly in the browser.

[backwardm]

I use Teamviewer all the time and find it very useful. I need to spend a little time to look at how the connections are made though—I'm not confident that it's secure since you have to enter an ID and password that are (I'm assuming) authenticated by a different machine controlled by Teamviewer. I wonder if the connection is sent through their computers (to get around router issues) and therefore susceptible to capturing passwords, etc. or if the connection is handed off to the two machines after the ID / password is handled.

[angryasian]

This really works very well. Its much faster and stable than thinvnc I was using on my chromebook. My only issue would be that I have to scroll a lot. I wish I could resize as the computer I'm connecting to has a much higher resolution (I think is causing the issue)

[mindcrime]

This kind of thing could be interesting. I've often bemoaned the use of HTML/Javascript as a "poor man's X server" and argued that a browser is not necessarily the best way to remote out a UI. VNC, on the other hand, is designed for pushing user interfaces out remotely, so integrating the two could be a very natural step.

What'll be interesting to see, is if we can get to a point where there's a very natural handoff mechanism between the browser and VNC. Will there be, for example, urls like:

vnc://myhost.com/some_remote_desktop

that will seamlessly start a VNC viewer? If so, that starts to become really cool.

Of course, I freely admit that I don't know well VNC works over public Internet / WAN links. That was always one of the arguments against using X, that the latency of WANs / the public Internet, screwed with it and made it fairly unusable. Not sure if VNC is better in this regard or not.

[drzaiusapelord]

Why are we still messing around with ancient technology like VNC? Its terrible. It just samples screen output; it does not intelligently understand the underlying GUI so it can't really cache anything or accelerate anything.

If we're going to replace HTML as a "poor man's interface" then we need to do better than VNC. Perhaps NX or RDP.

Still, I'd argue that HTML as a poor man's interface is perfect. I could sit down a write a HTML-based control panel that uses next to no resources. With VNC or whatever, now I need X running on my server, a GUI window manager running, and need to write a desktop app. This isn't progress.

[saljam]

Well, you can sort of already have that with a bit of JS and NoVNC.

http://kanaka.github.com/noVNC/

[neuroguy]

I used to use VNC viewer with ssh tunneling, I wonder if there is a way to do that with this extension... Switched to NX, but didn't set up the web viewer yet, so this would be an easy way to work on the road if could do ssh tunnel.

[gnud]

Set up a ssh tunnel, using ssh on *nix, or putty on windows. Then point the VNC viewer to the local port of that tunnel.

[giis]

>This application is not supported on this computer. Installation has been disabled.

Too bad, seems like it won't work with linux system.

[maethorechannen]

What version of Chrome are you running? It needs version 25, which is fairly recent.

[greggman]

Nice!!

And unlike Chicken of the VNC, this one actually supports the scrollwheel! (maybe there's some way to get Chicken of the VNC to support the scrollwheel but I didn't find it. I did find "Chicken", a fork of "Chicken of the VNC". It's got various connection bugs.)

No luck with copy and paste from Chrome OSX to Ubuntu 12 but maybe I'm doing it wrong

[achy]

Honest question: What is the benefit of running a native application inside a browser window instead of standalone?

[contingencies]

Google captures greater profits and influence by flogging people its DRM-infested ChromeOS machines for cheap, claiming they are hyper secure.

On the face of it, that may be right, but privacy and independence are lost. Victim buyers discover they can't do anything without either paying more money or being online (ie. under surveillance from the GooglePlex).

[balac]

I get the feeling that a lot of these apps are aimed at Chrome OS.

[MatthewPhillips]

You don't have to cycle between 2 application platforms: the host OS and your browser. If you already use a lot of web apps this is a real frustration. You essentially are running 2 OSes with separate conventions and context switching between those is not pleasant. This is why things like Fluid exist.

[Sambdala]

Not supported by ChromeOS apparently.

[saljam]

I hacked together an open source VNC viewer which can run on the ARM Chromebooks[0] earlier this year. Source code at [1]. It't far from perfect but it did what I needed it to do.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/vnc-viewer/ekheahf...

[1] https://bitbucket.org/saljam/vnc

[haxxorfreak]

This is probably relevant:

1. Download VNC Viewer for Google Chrome to a Windows, Mac OS X, UNIX, or Linux computer, or to a Chromebook or Chromebox with an Intel processor (support for ARM processors coming soon).

[Yhippa]

Hmm, this is cool. Spin up an EC2 instance and bam you've got access to developer tools.

[fiatjaf]

"This application is not supported on this computer. Installation has been disabled."

Not supported on Mint, apparently.

[maethorechannen]

Works for me on a AC700 Chromebook. I think it doesn't yet work on the Samsung ARM CB.

[angryasian]

Im on cr-48 and worked fine. Took a little bit while it said checking, but worked.

[iblaine]

I would like to add this to Chrome just in case I may use it but Chrome already has a 400MB memory footprint on my laptop. So I'll stick to teamviewer...but nice to know this is available if need be.

[Kellster]

Question: why would you use this instead of Back to My Mac on OSX? Isn't that all the same?

[shurcooL]

VNC servers can run on Linux, Windows, OS X. This is more similar to running VNC client as a native binary for your OS, except this lets you do it in Chrome.

The biggest benefit I can tell is if you can run this on Chrome OS now. That, and pushing the technology forward.

[ashwinaj]

Did anyone figure put how to paste your PC/Mac copied/cut text into the VNC session?

[aquaphile]

Take a look at Joel Martin's NoVNC using websockets and canvas.

[ImprovedSilence]

wow that is EXACTLY what I need. I Hope.