Enhancement: pass-through web browsing requests

[Mario Nigrovic]

Folks -

I'm curious whether anyone has ever requested some mechanism where web browsing requests could get passed from the VNC session back out to the machine where vncviewer is running?

For example, if I run vncviewer from a Windows machine where I'm also running my Chrome browser, then when some CAD tool running under VNC requests a web page be displayed, the request would somehow get handed off to Chrome (under Windows) to handle the actual request.

This would mean we wouldn't have to run a second browser within the VNC environment. Furthermore, at least in my environment, the Linux machines don't have direct access to the WWW, and cutting and pasting URLs is tedious.

-- Mario

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[Andrew Aitchison]

This is a great request.

I have the same desire; but my local device is an Android tablet,
so no tigervnc. I guess we want interoperability between VNC solutions ?

(Some) Linux distros have a web-browser command like sensible-browser,
urlviewer or htmlview which is intended to be customized,
then used by all applications which wish a web page to be displayed.
This might be a good place for the vnc mechanism to hook into.

Currently I use 'xclip' to pass the URL from the remote application
to the clipboard on my viewing device. From there it is easy to paste
it into the local browser and view.
(I have a script involving tty-copy to do nearly the same thing
through a mosh/ssh terminal session)

> For example, if I run vncviewer from a Windows machine where I'm also
> running my Chrome browser, then when some CAD tool running under VNC
> requests a web page be displayed, the request would somehow get handed off
> to Chrome (under Windows) to handle the actual request.

Do you happen to know how your CAD tool currently requests the URL
to be displayed on the remote screen ?
If this is "under the hood", the enhancement would need to hook
into that mechanism to divert the request to the local/client device.

[Andrew Aitchison]

file:// URLs will only work when the tigervnc client
and server machines share a filesystem.
Should this be restricted to socket or localhost connections ?

The URL will of course need to be escaped and checked carefully,

so that the local device is not induced to run a command controlled

by an attacker on the remote machine.