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Comment by danso | Hacker News Reader

I personally use Chrome and I teach a class that involves some lessons on HTTP/web scraping/web app dev and I ask the class to use Chrome. For me, my bias is towards how much I like Chrome's dev tools, though I haven't used Firefox's in awhile. The ease of creating multiple browser profiles is great, too, though I hear FF has the same thing.

I'm not much of a plugin user, but I'll be using Chrome's Secure Shell [0] for the first time ever and will be advising Windows students to use it over PuTTY (at first, anyway). It's kind of a lifesaver for me because PuTTY, from my experience a couple years ago, is a much more stilted experience than OS X Terminal. I see Firefox has FireSSH [1] and will give that a try, but the high user base of Chrome's Secure Shell (600K+) gives me a little assurance about the reliability of the plugin.

[0] https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/secure-shell/pnhec...

[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firessh/

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You can always consider using Chromium if you want "the best of both worlds". You'd protect your students' privacy, which for them can be a valuable lesson. Furthermore you can introduce them in that way to another OSS project, which might spark their interest in OSS.

All without losing the convenience that you talk about.

A little off topic, I've extensively used the secure shell plugin for chrome and I find it a very good experience compared to putty. The only minor issues I hit were:

- Some keyboard combinations will be intercepted by the browser before going to the plugin (big one was ctrl-w which I used in vim a lot). The fix for this is to run the extension in it's own window; you can do this by right clicking the extension on chrome://apps and selecting "Open as window".

- It doesn't handle mixed width fonts very well and they jumble up the screen a little. This came up for me when using powerline. I couldn't find a fix for this at the time.

Hope that info is useful!

Can it be said that your bias is purely based on the familiarity?

Yes, Firefox has multiple profiles.

Putting "all your eggs in one basket" in security context is suspicious. For SSH, Putty is a small program compared to the whole Chrome, security-wise much easier to evaluate. I don't know how using Chrome for SSH can be rationalized. Who is behind of that "Secure Shell" plugin ("offered by chrome-secure-shell-publishers")?

There's an official SSH extensions from Google.

Definitely, the bias is familiarity, as it usually is. I started my webdev days when Firebug was big, so FF was my main browser. Then Chrome came, and besides being a nice browser, its dev tools had the same familiarity of Firebug's. IIRC, FF's default tools, for some time, were different than Firebug's and I think I just liked not having to fight with the FF defaults over time (as I moved between machines frequently).

As for my class, yes, I'm not enthusiastic about shelling from the browser no matter how many people like it. But the main mitigation is that the class work we do is based off of my AWS setup: I spin up the EC2 instances and I manage/distribute the keys. None of the assignments require using their own personal info. And another reason for teaching them how to use browser profiles (something I've never seen students have set up) is so that they if they want to build something with Twitter's API, i can strongly advise for them to make a fake account and operate it in a different profile, to prevent accidental Twitter snafus (among other problems).

Why Chrome shell over PuTTY? I remember struggling with things like copy and paste, to the point where I think it is easier to use the mouse...but I push students pretty hard on using the mouse as little as possible. Chrome Shell feels as close to the OSX Terminal with the exception of key handling and the inability to access or transfer files from your own system.

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