Could DigitalOcean use Secure Shell (Chrome Web App) for the online terminal

Secure Shell is a pretty great chrome extension, let me give some background on it that I think might explain why DigitalOcean can’t use something like that for the Web Console:

Secure Shell is only available as a Chrome Extension because it relies on something called Native Client. This is essentially a way for extensions to run pre-compiled C code with hooks and listeners that allow your C program to interface with the browser. So all the important SSH connection and encryption stuff for Secure Shell is actually happening in the Native Client part of the extension, and then just piping input and output to the browser.

Long story short, in order for DigitalOcean to switch to something like Secure Shell in the Web Console, everyone would have to:

1. Download and use Chrome when logging in to cloud.digitalocean.com
2. Download and activate DigitalOcean’s version of Secure Shell as a Chrome Extension

The point of the Web Console is to give everyone a quick and easy way of logging in to their droplet when they don’t have a better option.

If you find yourself using the Web Console a lot, you will probably find that switching to using an SSH client will greatly improve your experience, this tutorial is a good starting point:

or if you are on windows, this tutorial will walk you through connecting to your server with the windows SSH client, putty: