Chrome (and Edge) affecting Remote Desktop Access

Mr Cheese 1 Reputation point
2021-02-19T06:32:04.083+00:00

Hi. Just posting this question as I have been experiencing this problem for some time and waning to see if this is an issue others have come across. I use Remote Desktop to access PCs via a VPN. I have a LAN to LAN based VPN, and also use a software VPN client on some occasions. I am not 100% certain of this, but this problem appears to occur often when using Chrome or Edge browser on the remote PC I am accessing. I find my RDP access is quite good, and not have issues, but quite often when I open Chrome my session freezes and unable to get any response from the remote PC. I then quit the RDP session, and reconnect, and all is OK. So I feel like using the Chrome Web browser (and Edge) causes the RDP to "stall". This situation is experienced on multiple PCs, both host and remote. Only common factor I see is the network VPN configuration. All PCs used (both host and remote) are Windows 10 Professional with latest updates, and are on a WorkGroup and not a domain. Seeking to see if anyone has experienced this, and hope to get some suggestions on what I could look into to find out why this might be happening.

Windows 10
Windows 10
A Microsoft operating system that runs on personal computers and tablets.
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Remote Desktop
Remote Desktop
A Microsoft app that connects remotely to computers and to virtual apps and desktops.
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  1. Supratim Sircar 186 Reputation points
    2021-02-21T05:51:50.283+00:00

    @Mr Cheese

    To prevent this you can enable Strict Site Isolation / Strict Origin Isolation on Google Chrome on both host and remote machines. Chrome already has a built in sandboxing technology and this feature puts even stronger security boundaries between websites than Chrome’s existing sandboxing technology.
    This is how Google describes the Strict Site Isolation feature in a support page:

    Google’s site isolation feature improves security for Chrome browser users. When you enable site isolation, content for each open website in the Chrome browser is always rendered in a dedicated process, isolated from other sites. This creates an additional security boundary between websites.

    You can enable it via a command line flag:

    1. Find your Google Chrome icon/shortcut on the desktop and right-click on it.
    2. Select Properties from the drop-down menu.
    3. Select the Shortcut tab.
    4. In the Target field, add the following text --site-per-process at the end of the shortcut path and click on Apply (It may need admin privileges to apply the changes) and then OK.

    After doing this the Chrome processes will not cause any interference with the RDP service, as each site gets loaded in its own isolated process.

    The same setting goes for Microsoft Edge Chromium.

    To be noted: As per Google, this may increase memory consumption by 20%, but I found no such memory spikes in my testing Chrome in normal mode and this flag enabled.

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