How to open browser (Chrome, Firefox) on the remote machine via terminal

You can open a chrome window on the remote machine via terminal with X11 forwarding. First of all, some configuration needs to be done. Open on your machine (client) ssh configuration:

vim ~/.ssh/config

Make sure that it contains:

Host *
  ForwardX11 yes

Check that on the server (remote machine) X11 forwarding is enabled. Open this file:

vim /etc/ssh/sshd_config

and check that it contains:

X11Forwarding yes
X11DisplayOffset 10

Now you can connect from your machine to the remote server with command:

ssh -Y your_name@server

Check with (env command) that environmental variable DISPLAY is something like localhost:10.0. If not, set it with command:

export DISPLAY=localhost:10.0

To check that everything was set up correctly, run on the remote server:

xclock

You should be able to see a window of the xclock application. Now you are ready to run chrome with command:

google-chrome

I had some permission issue that prevented chrome from starting, I managed to fix it by changing user data directory:

google-chrome --user-data-dir=.chrome_profile

This also might be useful:

google-chrome --no-sandbox 

Firefox can be launched just with:

firefox 

Make sure that you have permissions for the .mozilla and .cache directory on the remote machine