Many times i have heard people saying that a particular hardware to be running a thin client web browser. But from the definition of “thin-client”, doesnt all browser qualify as a thin-client? as all they do is rendering the information sent from a remote server minimizing the work at the browser end?
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The definition of a “thin client” (from wikipedia):
A thin client (sometimes also called a lean or slim client) is a computer or a computer program which depends heavily on some other computer (its server) to fulfill its traditional computational roles
Browsers started as rendering engines for HTML. Servers provided the raw HTML text and the clients (the browser) rendered the text into something nicer – so browsers are actually fat clients!.
Now if you have an application that is web-based (that is, runs on a browser), you can develop it as a thin- or a fat-client independent of the fact that it runs on a browser. You can develop full applications that will run on the browser without needing to fetch any data from the server and doing all the computation by itself, or you can develop an app that has no state, no calculations, only visual logic, and everything else is done on the server.
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Although all browsers indeed qualify to be a thin client, browsers running certain plug-ins also qualify to be a fat client. For example, if you have an Adobe Flash or a Microsoft Silverlight plugin, your browser can be programmed to run a thick client built on top of a given plugin.
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