From: ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com [mailto:ozdotnet-boun...@ozdotnet.com] On Behalf Of Greg Harris Sent: Wednesday, 22 November 2017 3:44 PM To: ozDotNet <ozdotnet@ozdotnet.com> Subject: Re: Creating a browser-based product
Plugins like Silverlight and Flash made web apps open to using a lot more of the client machine’s resources to provide an interactive experience. But, the industry has not supported these plugins for some reason I fail to fully understand. Because Adobe Flash was more bugs than actual working code? The cost of supporting Flash made it unappealing to people who pay the bills? If we cannot use Silverlight or Flash and fat clients are too hard / expensive to install, you are back to the dumb terminal browser plus Javascript again. Yes, and no. There’s offline storage, and some execution, that can be offloaded to browsers. Look at compute intensive apps like 3D modelling or video editing, they could never be done properly with today’s browser technology! Nothing is binary. At some point, the benefit of running a thick client native app is greater than the cost of maintaining it. But those use cases seem to be shrinking year-on-year. Or maybe even a win forms app, because it is fast, I have 100% control and it is not really that hard to install! The technical cost of your one app isn’t that much. But the total cost of supporting a desktop does not increase linearly with the number of apps. It increases exponentially, and thus doesn’t scale.
