Your first remote session
Open a machine's screen, switch monitors, control quality, send keyboard shortcuts, and read the connection indicator that tells you how you are connected.
Open Devices, pick a machine, click View screen. What follows is the session surface and how to read it.
The connection indicator
The single most useful thing on screen. It tells you how the two ends are talking, which explains almost every performance question before you ask it.
| Reads | Meaning | Expect |
|---|---|---|
| LAN | Same local network | Best case — a few milliseconds |
| Direct | Straight across the internet | Very good; latency is the network’s |
| Relay | No direct path; traffic is bounced through a relay | Higher latency, capped bandwidth |
Relay is not a verdict, it is a stage
A pair that lands on a relay keeps trying to upgrade to a direct path in the background — it does not give up and stay there. If it stays relayed, that is worth investigating: see cannot connect.
Multiple monitors
A machine with several displays exposes each one; switch between them from the session toolbar. Each switch renegotiates the stream, so expect a brief blur as the first full frame arrives.
Quality and performance
The session adapts on its own: it measures what the path can carry and spends its bits accordingly, dropping detail before it drops responsiveness.
You can steer it with a priority control:
| Priority | Trades | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| Responsiveness | Sharpness while things move | Dragging windows, scrolling, anything interactive |
| Balanced | The default | Almost everything |
| Clarity | Latency for detail | Reading small text, design work, still screens |
A still screen sharpens itself
When motion stops, the encoder spends its budget on detail rather than frame rate, so a screen you stop touching gets crisper after a moment. That is expected behaviour, not a glitch.
Keyboard and shortcuts
Keystrokes are injected on the far end, so the remote machine’s own keyboard layout applies. Two things regularly surprise people:
Some shortcuts are captured by *your* machine, not sent
Ctrl+Alt+Del, and on macOS most Cmd combinations, are intercepted by the
operating system you are sitting at, before the browser ever sees them. Use the
session toolbar’s key-send control for those.
Mac-to-Windows and Windows-to-Mac sessions remap the modifier keys so the combination you press means what you expect on the far side.
Ending a session
Close the tab or click Disconnect. The remote machine is not logged out and nothing is left running.
Every session start, end and refusal is recorded — who connected, when, from where. Consent and audit covers what is kept.
The pixel stream is never recorded
Session metadata is audited. The screen contents deliberately are not, and there is no server-side recording of a remote session. Anything else would make the server a data path, which is the one thing the design does not permit.
If the screen is black
Almost always a capture-permission problem on the target, not a network problem — and the operating system usually reports no error at all. See black screen and per-OS permissions.