Thin client Web browser?

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?

No, a browser is not a thin client, at least not anymore. With the proliferation of web applications, there's a ton of stuff that happen on the client, it's not just about rendering information. Also, this "If all browsers are indeed thin-clients does that mean all the clients in a client server architecture a thin clients" doesn't make sense. Even if browsers were thin clients, what does that have to do with any other client server architecture?

Sorry I did not frame the second part of my question correctly. I have removed it to focus on the first part of my question.

The browser alone isn't the client. The memory and CPU power on the client can be factors in how well some things will run and that is what determines how thin or thick a client is.

2 Answers 2

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.