Blog of Travis Glines

Dear Google Chrome Team,

I’m a huge fan of your browser, Chrome OS and your efforts to bring applications to the web. However I find that one thing missing would help me greatly: an SSH client built into Chrome.

I’ve even found more people looking for the same:
http://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/group/chromium-os-discuss/browse_thread/thread/50ec071f2512371d

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=5953879cbacec9f0&hl=en

Like said in those threads it could be extremely simple … type “ssh://username@domain.com:port_number”. You could even bookmark it and simply click it to go to the server, it would ask you for a password and bingo you’d be in. Heres a screenshot:

If you wanted to get real fancy with it you could do some theme overriding, ssh key stuff and scp file upload/download tool.

I use windows as my main operating system (software availability/drivers being the main motivation for this) and typically ssh into linux servers from there. This means that I have to use Putty or another SSH client to navigate to them. One main problem is if I’m on a friends/family member/library’s computer it probably has Google Chrome but no SSH client. This means I have to go out and download Putty onto their system if I can at all. (Administrator privileges required) An SSH client built in would solve that in one fell swoop.

I would love to use just one application to communicate with outside servers (and have applications live on the web, not on my desktop) some day and think that integrating an SSH client could be a huge step forward in this goal.