Citrix Cloud – Secure Browser Service
Summary
Citrix Have a cloud based secure browser service unsurprisingly called ‘Secure Browser Service‘. Here is a quick summary of the features / notes taken during a PoC for a customer.
Review
Basically this is an Azure hosted cloud delivery of URLS you specify to publish to users (either anonymously or via your own authentication methods) combined with a browser that is ‘locked down’. You can have Firefox, Chrome, IE11 or IE11 (64bit). Even for a quick test. It’s awesome. Quick, Simple and reliable.
Flash and Video support (youtube) are native, albeit it noticeably slow (but still worked even for a UK based user while the resources were Azure West US region!) Signing up for trial was simple and very quick via my mycitrix.com account (5 minutes after requesting the, trial was ready to go)
From a customisation perspective there is little that is changeable – and possibly will stay this way to keep the service offering simple – you can always deploy your own secure browser service via XA/XD for further customisations. Well done Citrix.
| Initial Overview Page |
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| Clicking Get started |
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| Enter a Name, URL and select the browser and region |
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| Browser and Region Options
I selected IE11 and West US as the region |
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| Clicking Launch | Application launched very quickly, but because its published initially in Kiosk mode my native response was to click ‘refresh’ which reloaded the entire published app – not the webpage (including back buttons etc)
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| Secure Browser service supports on prem apps / backends |  |
| Change Settings
Manage > Enable non-kiosk mode |
 
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| Launching with non-kiosk | 
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| Other sites were accessible
(But I didn’t push my luck) |
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| youtube.com was noticeably slow but still worked, sound and all! Pretty good by default. |  |
| Where is it hosted and did it match the region published in – YES
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| Flash is available and the Internet speed was very fast
Flash quality was low and jittery – but was absolutely usable even with approx 150ms from my device to West US Azure |
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| Statistics on usage |  |
| Summary | Even for a PoC / Demo this is fantastic. Quick and simple and no obvious major issues. Well Done Citrix! |
