Abstract:
Google is currently planning to deprecate support for client-side XSLT from the Chromium browser, which may cause the Remote Desktop Web access page in Windows Server server systems to not display properly. Since the portal relies on the browser to perform XSLT transformations, IT administrators need to have alternatives in place before the browser is updated.
Why Remote Desktop Web is affected:
RD Web Access is the web version of Remote Desktop Services that allows users to log in through a browser and access authorized remote desktops and applications. Traditional portals use XSLT in the client and transform the XML content returned by the server into a web interface.
When the browser disables XSLT support, the page may display errors such as RD Web Access cannot be displayed, and users cannot see remote resources. Microsoft's support document shows that Windows Server 2016/2019/2022/2025 are affected, and the problem occurs after the XSLT function is turned off by policy.
Why Google is banning XSLT:
Google stated that XSLT currently only appears in about 0.02% of web page loads, and the proportion of XSLT processing instructions is less than 0.001%. The libxslt used by Chromium is an old C/C++ code library and has memory security risks such as buffer overflows. Therefore, maintenance costs and security risks no longer match its usage.
According to Google's plan, Google will stop supporting XSLT starting from Chrome version 158 released on November 17. Enterprise policies or source trial users can continue to use it temporarily. These enterprise policies will also be completely disabled when Chrome version 176 is released on August 17, 2027, so enterprises still have 10 months to migrate.
Microsoft provides temporary policy:
Enable XSLT support by setting the Chromium browser's XSLTEnabled option to 1 via Group Policy or the registry
Deploy an HTML5 Remote Desktop web client so users can start a session or download an RDP file directly in the browser
Add RD Web Access addresses to the compatibility list using IE mode in the Microsoft Edge browser
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