With the advent of n-tier architectures, thin clients (e.g., web browsers and Internet appliances) have become the fashion in development. Interestingly enough, this model is very similar to the old terminal-to-mainframe applications.

The problem with thin clients is that a great deal of computing power is wasted, because the (often powerful) client machines are reduced to running a web browser. Web applications often use client-side data validation, but this is a minimal amount of computation. The use of clients for powerful computing, though, is hindered by the continuing conflict between Internet Explorer and Netscape. IE supports ActiveX controls; Netscape supports plugins. IE handles DHTML well; Netscape generally doesn't. The object models are similar, but not identical. All of these make the web programmer's job difficult. Even cross-browser systems like Shockwave and Flash come with their own problems: poor object models or complicated workarounds.