17. July 2013 3 min read

Surf web through ssh using Surf browser

When you can connect to your remote server using ssh and you would like to change some router settings or just browse the web with different IP, you will hit a great obstacle. In terminal you can only use text-browsers like lynx. They are good for fast Google search, but what about some nicer looking websites? You are probably thinking, my computer has desktop, ssh can act as link and just transfer X data stream to me. This is true and possible.

SSH with Graphics enabled

You need to ssh to remote server with flags to enable graphics. And because we know graphics require a lot of data tansfer, we want to use fastest compression, so that you can surf at normal speed

# in terminal run
ssh -c arcfour,blowfish-cbc -XC username@ipordomain.com

Now you enter your ssh password and you are connected to your server through terminal. Next step is to load browser on your server and open it - ssh will do the rest

Fastest and most suitable graphics browsers

You can load Chromium or even Firefox, but they are not really best in such situations. You need a small and fast browser, which is developed by most hardcore programmers - but most useful just in cases like this

Surf browser

Surf browser is developed by suckless.org and you can read more about this browser on their website. There you also have source code, so you can compile it for your system. README is quite good for this, but the easiest way for newbie to install this browser is by using

sudo apt-get install surf-browser

# To run you just type surf with url
surf http://url

Simple as that a graphics window will open loading the desired page. Leave a comment below if you have any additional trouble

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