web based ssh?

[Chris Brannon]

John G Heim <jheim at math.wisc.edu> writes:

> How can an ssh client run in a browser? Maybe the ssh client can be
> launched by the browser. But it has to establish a connection and talk
> to the server via the ssh protocol on port 22.  Ultimately, it's no
> different than putty or secureCRT.

Well, the modern web browser is being treated as more of an application
platform than a document viewer these days, and you can run all sorts of
things in them, including ssh clients.  This has been going on for years
with Chrome.  They have something called ssh in a tab, which is an ssh
client running inside the browser.  This is how you use ssh as
a client in ChromeOS, where Chrome is more-or-less the user interface
layer.  I have no idea how accessible "ssh in a tab" is, but considering
just how much I dislike web browsers, I cannot imagine that I would
consider it a pleasant experience.  Anyway, to each their own.  I seem
to recall that "ssh in a tab" is implemented as a browser extension.
Some quick googling reveals something called FireSSH, which is an ssh
client written entirely in JavaScript, supporting both Mozilla Firefox
and Google Chrome.

The difference between this kind of thing and native applications
like Putty and SecureCRT is that the browser-based thing is
cross-platform.

-- Chris