User experience is always top of mind at Citrix. Offering a seamless experience regardless of operating system has always been at the forefront of the Citrix Workspace app team does. Our host-to-client URL redirection feature has proved to be an exceptional tool for offloading browser traffic and improving user experience on video calls. As remote work becomes the new normal, more and more organizations are eager to take advantage of this feature.

That’s why we are excited to highlight that host-to-client URL redirection is available today across multiple Citrix Workspace app platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, iOS, Chrome and HTML5!

Supported across every platform except Citrix Workspace app for Android, this capability should be in every admin’s toolkit. As the name suggests, by using host-to-client URL redirection, you can force a published app that opens a web page to launch from a user workstation instead of the Citrix Virtual Apps server. With this, users can continue to use Office apps such as Outlook from within Citrix Virtual Apps. However, browser sessions or links within the published instance of Outlook are sent back to the local machine for processing. This reduces the processing load on the virtual app and enables better performance.

This feature is also incredibly helpful for users who are trying to access specific geolocated features but who are not in the same location as their datacenter. For example, previously, if a user in India was accessing a search engine but the datacenter they were connecting to was in France, the user would get only European features. By using host-to-client URL redirection, users will now get the right features because the search engine will open in the local workstation.

This is also a great feature for individuals who use video conferencing apps. With URL redirection, the user can redirect the video conferencing app URL from within their Citrix session to open in the local browser. The URL will be redirected but not any tokens. So, the user needs to sign in again in the video conferencing app to access it. For example, take a meeting invite within a Citrix published app, like a link for Microsoft Teams or GoToMeeting invite in Outlook. The user can click directly on the meeting link, and it allows you to either open the link inside the Citrix virtual session or redirects the link to open on the local browser.

The video below shows the experience for Citrix Workspace app for HTML5 with host-to-client URL redirection. You can find the details about this feature in the Citrix Workspace app for HTML5 documentation.

It is important to note that if there is no local browser configured on the client device, the URL is redirected back to the server VDA. This feature works only on Citrix Virtual Apps session and server VDAs and not on desktop VDAs. If this feature is enabled by the admins, the user will not be able to disable it on their client device. URL redirection from a published browser app won’t be redirected to the local browser because the published browser will try and launch the link. Host-to-client redirection is not used for URLs in a web browser (either in a webpage or typed in the address bar of the web browser).

Learn more about configuring host-to-client URL redirection, and thank you for using the Citrix Workspace app. Please share your suggestions and feedback in the comments section below.