SSH browser doesn't work in Compute Engine GCP

If you're using Firefox (same as me). This seems to be the problem as chrome works fine. Apparently Firefox has a bug. Idk if it's an actual bug or it's done on purpose because sometimes (less times) this works on Firefox and then sometimes doesn't unless I keep and keep reopening an closing the SSH.

Instead of opening and closing every time hoping for a chance to work and or using chrome, If you have linux or in my case I have Windows subsystem for Linux on my windows computer, so I can just SSH to it.

For windows, you could use the subsystem, or use Putty (Here's a putty tutorial https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fmh94mNQHQc on how to connect to GCC) That putty tutorial is also similar to how you can do it on the subsystem so you can still watch it for that too

It's a bug in a Chromium library that affects Firefox. Use Chrome as a workaround.

To use the browser to SSH to a GCE instance, you need to be a compute instance admin. Also, if you run that instance with a Service Account, your account need to be a Service Account user. Check this link for more information: https://cloud.google.com/compute/docs/ssh-in-browser

In addition, did you check that your firewall allows connections to SSH port (22) from Google IP ranges ?

You can find them by using these commands (see https://support.google.com/a/answer/60764)

nslookup -q=TXT _netblocks.google.com 8.8.8.8
nslookup -q=TXT _netblocks2.google.com 8.8.8.8
nslookup -q=TXT _netblocks3.google.com 8.8.8.8

You can try different methods of connecting an instance to see if the issue is underlying at SSH or somewhere else.

There are several ways to connect a Linux instance via the SSH. You can connect to an instance via the terminal. You can connect via the Cloud Console Web UI which is in general the most convenient way to connect to an instance. Also, you can use Google Cloud SDK and run below command to connect to an instance via SSH:

$ gcloud compute ssh [INSTANCE_NAME]

You can also use Cloud Shell to connect your instance from the Cloud Console web UI by using the same command as above. You can connect via the serial console using the Google Cloud Platform Console, the gcloud command-line tool, or a third-party SSH client. The serial console authenticates users with SSH keys. Specifically, you must add your public SSH key to the project or instance metadata, and store your private key on the local machine from which you want to connect. There are other advanced methods to connect to an instance.

I would also recommend to check if you have firewall rule for port 22 which is required for SSH. You can go to the VPC Network from Cloud Console and then Firewall Rules tab, check if you have firewall rule for port 22 and that rule applied to affected instance or not. If there no firewall rule for port 22, create firewall rule and apply to the affected instance.

You can also follow this SSH troubleshooting steps mentioned at this link.

I have the same problem and after recreating 4 instances and going thru every possible ssh key scenario I decided to try chrome and it worked fine whereas in firefox i get the blank black screen after the key handshake. I watched thru the serial port and the sys log showed all of the same entries for my broken web ssh session in firefox as it did for the working chrome web ssh session which means it has to be a problem with firefox.

Same issue. Ad blocker was to blame. Try whitelisting, disabling or use a private window.