Chrome Remote Desktop goes mobile | Hacker News Reader

Chrome Remote Desktop goes mobile

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118 pointsdeanmoriarty54 comments

Just gave it a shot from my Samsung GS3 to my 15" Retina MBP. The setup on the client computer is a bit annoying, but once it's up, it's very straightforward.

I did notice that the resolution was downgraded on the MBP and I had to manually restore it to the best setting via System Preferences after the connection. Other than that, it worked fine.

I'm using it to post a comment from my Nexus 5. Naturally the connection is particularly good because they are on the same WiFi Network but really, this is pretty great. Really good mouse cursor control too.

I noticed the mouse position shown on my Android phone didn't match with the actual mouse postion on my Mac

Works well and the setup was quick and easy.

1. Install Chrome extension

2. Open the "App" in Chrome and enable remote desktop on computer and set pin

3. Install Android app, open it, then choose desktop from list and connect

On my Mac I also had to run the Chrome Remote Desktop Host installer.

Don't forget the official Microsoft Remote Desktop app[1] or the Citrix Receiver app[2] if your office supports that.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft....

[2] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.citrix.Rec...

Citrix Receiver has been broken for me since Kit Kat.

This probably doubles how much I value my Nexus 7.

I'm not sure what the value of this would be on a Nexus 7 -- there are plenty of remote desktop apps available for Android.

Chrome Remote Desktop authorizes under my Google account, which I have configured to require Two-Factor Authentication. That's nice.

Plus, the machine I'm remoting talks up to Google, so I don't have to configure any firewall rules to allow incoming connections.

Plus it was authored by Google, so I trust it significantly more.

Already works for Remote Assistance for Windows, Mac, and Linux. And I have expectations it will work for remote control for all those platforms, soon, too.

Oh, and I can have the Chrome Remote Desktop client on any PC that has Chrome. I've found that several of the "remote desktop apps available for Android" ONLY have an Android client.

This, I had actually thought about trying to set up some remote desktop for my tablet to use but decided against it as I figured it would be too much trouble but as soon as I saw this announcement I downloaded and was ready to go in no time.

All your points are valid.

But for Windows, I use the built in remote desktop feature/server and the client is pre-installed on every Windows machine. I'm at work remoting into my home machine right now. But I can also use any number of different Linux, Android, or iOS clients to connect to it. It does require two seconds to setup port forwarding and I use a dynamic DNS service.

The performance of an RDP-based solution is going to be much better than this. But if you're remoting into OS X or Linux then there is no advantage.

RDP, courtesy of various licensed Citrix technology, is world's above so many other technologies: I can RDP to a desktop running thousands of miles away over the internet with better performance and responsiveness than VNCing to the Mac sitting 10 feet away, over a 1Gbps twisted pair. I am not exaggerating for effect, but after being spoiled by RDP, VNC is close to unusable.

It is unfortunate that close to no attention is paid to this element.

Have you had opportunity to try NoMachine? I knew them as the NX people - they seem to be giving their tech away these days.

https://www.nomachine.com/

NX (also check X2GO, OpenNX etc) is very good and it's as fast as RDP. Much, much better than VNC.

Oh, and it's been my experience that Remote Desktop sucks when you're using OpenGL. I've seen several apps go bananas when you RDP into the desktop.

Maybe that's gotten better over time, but it used to suck bad.

The problem is that technology like VNC is so slow over most connections that it's virtually useless. I'll take a random OpenGL failure over frustrating performance all the time.

the worlds crazy when someone trust more a closed source application that routes data via a 3rd party then the miriad of opensource client and servers for vnc that does not include any third party nor closed source.

more convenient, maybe. but more secure? give me a break.

It's open source.

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromotingBuildInstr...

And I'm arguing with someone who prefers Microsoft Remote Desktop.

You're right that I'm using a 3rd Party to establish my connection, so there is that.

I'm happily using https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.freerdp.af... for direct RDP connection Windows (and Linux with xrdp installed). Might take a port forward to setup, but direct RDP quality is unbeatable

The security is beatable, unfortunately. Do RDP through a VPN for the sake of your own sanity.

The details: http://www.fishnetsecurity.com/6labs/blog/remote-desktop-pro...

You might want to try https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.microsoft.... , the official Microsoft RDP app; works great in my experience

I tried both and like afreerdp better

I think I'll stick with TeamViewer. Anyone used both who can give a quick comparison?

TeamViewer is a lot faster, but Chrome Remote Desktop has its advantages.

Sadly you can't enter an access code to accept invitations to view other's desktops. Also the exporting a desktop side doesn't support Linux, although you can invite others to view. (CRD distinguishes between accessing other's desktops while they are seated there versus accessing your own unattended desktop.)

One gotcha to watch out for is that your unattended desktop has to actually be awake and running. If it goes into power saving mode you can't access it. It also seems to take CRD a long time (often hours) to realise that a sleeping system is no longer sleeping.

>Also the exporting a desktop side doesn't support Linux, although you can invite others to view.

This makes me wonder how much more work Linux desktop support would have been?

The unattended export needs to run as a daemon and potentially get involved on the security side (ie let you unlock the desktop even when not in front of the machine).

It mainly seems to me that Google really just doesn't care about the Linux desktop even though reports are half the employees using Goobuntu. Another example is Google Drive not being available for Linux.

This is not official, but if this is a pain point for you this might help: https://github.com/astrada/google-drive-ocamlfuse

We solve the problem by paying over $1k/yr to Dropbox who are of the opinion that people do actually use Linux.

Of course then Dropbox mess up the multi-account thing badly even with the recent changes.

It might not be supported, but you can get it working perfectly well on Ubuntu and Arch.

You can also build your own Remote Desktop if you wanted, since DesktopCapture [1] was released for extensions in Chrome 34 Stable last week.

[1] https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/desktopCapture

This only allows capture right? Or is there control?

This is great, but I was really hoping they would add a way to remotely control other Android device.

This is the sort of thing I expect Windows Phone to really excel at. Should be one of the big benefits from Microsoft unifying their code base and UI between mobile and PC. Does this feature exist, or is it in the works?

The best part of Chrome Remote Desktop is that it punches through firewalls.

Aww man, "This app is incompatible with all of your devices." in the Play Store. And when I clicked detail, "This item cannot be installed in your device's country." :(

I wonder how far we are away from your Chrome OS basically being run or mirrored completely in the cloud. With Google hosting/mirroring your entire OS bit like a kind of VM on a server.

didn't even know this was in chrome how secure is this?

It isn't in Chrome until you download and install the "Chrome App" for it: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-remote-desk...

AFAIK the app contains binary code for each supported platform, so it's really more like Chrome-as-app-store than anything else.

Not a direct answer but Chrome team is very security conscientious. Furthermore, it is probably more secure than using a 3rd party app and handing over to them credentials to your machine.

> it is probably more secure than using a 3rd party app and handing over to them credentials to your machine

Well, unless you consider your computer Google-owned, this is using a third-party (Google) app and handing over to them credentials to your machine.

However, trusting a third party for connection initiation is the only option unless one has a computer that's globally addressable and accessible from the Internet.

Still, as (IIRC) Chrome Remote Desktop does not provide end-to-end authentication (i.e. peers don't visibly - in a manner acknowledgeable by the end-user - authenticate that they're genuinely securely communicating to each other without third party inbetween), so it's probably less secure, if compared to a VPN-to-home service.

So this is like VNC, except VNC will work with my Ubuntu desktop.

Is there something else to this? That page is pretty sparse on details.

The actual display protocol isn't that interesting. The things that matter are connectivity and convenience. You can be in any random network location, as can the desktop, and it will be able to do the connectivity plumbing. On the convenience side it hooks into your Google authentication (blessing or curse) and requires an additional PIN for the connection.

The Chrome extension for viewing lets you invite someone to access your desktop. The viewers and desktops can be any combination of Linux, Windows or Mac.

Unlike skype, viewers can interact with the desktop.

Ah, ok, cool. Thank you.

It can be setup on Ubuntu https://plus.sandbox.google.com/+FrancoisBeaufort/posts/2fHN...

Thank you; I need to give this a shot.

Finally! Been hoping for this for years, especially now that LogMeIn is no longer free.

Doesn't work on Linux + Chromium. Anyone else having similar issues ?

I don't think Chrome Remote Desktop lets you share a Linux desktop. I tried a few months ago and found it's a long standing (year plus!) request to Google on their support group. Kind of sad that Google can't or won't support Linux here.

This will probably be how I control my HTPC from now on.

I couldn't figure out how to click.

tapping on the screen worked for me

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