Remember when Web-based applications were going to save us all? Nothing to install on the local system, quick and easy access, centralized security, lower TCO, and a bevy of other big benefits. Ah, those were the days. Unfortunately, it seems that those noble ideals were co-opted by the same type of mediocre programmers that made many thick apps such a disgrace -- they managed to take a framework that should have resulted in far fewer IT headaches and turned it into a worse situation than before.
Here's an example. Vital Application A was built specifically for Internet Explorer and will not work on any other browser. In fact, it was built specifically for IE 6 and will not work with IE 7 or IE 8. Vital Application B worked fine with IE 6, but a recent upgrade broke that, and it will now only work on IE 7, but only as long as nearly all the security protection settings are turned off. And so on, ad nauseum.
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It's an impossible position. There's no way to make this work reliably and securely. In fact, it's likely that browser-specific stipulations such as this will be more responsible for future IT application choice and direction rather than features and cost. Too bad if a new application is cheaper, simpler, and richer in features -- if it cannot run on the currently installed user browser, you're out of luck.
So how did we get here? Simple: Laziness, time, and a disturbing reliance on closed frameworks. It's probably accurate to say that if anyone was going to start building an enterprise Web application at this point in time, they'd head straight for an AJAX foundation -- at least I hope so. But that wasn't available eight years ago when the application was developed. Now the app is at Version 9.45, and it's an ungodly mess of ActiveX controls and patchwork .Net code. The application vendor has probably had several meetings to discuss the possibility of rewriting it from scratch to alleviate the constant break/fix cycle caused by the legacy code, but it's just not feasible in this economy.
And there we are.
Users are confused, too. They see what's happening whether they understand it or not. They use eBay; they use Facebook and Gmail and sites driven by Drupal all the time. Then they look at the applications they have to use day in and day out that resemble an Edsel in comparison. They know enough to use Firefox at home, but they're forced to use IE at work. Users may not be IT people, but they notice things that affect their daily functions on a fundamental level.
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Most new internal browser-based apps built today will suffer the same fate down the road, regardless of framework or technology.
Pay now or pay more later. Guess what the choice will be, especially in these straitened times?