More critical issues to consider when choosing browser based tools or applications

Browser based applications seem like a good idea. You deploy a server with an application and users simply use a web browser to access it. No installation, patching, or maintenance of the end user’s workstation is required. What could be more simple?

As I wrote previously, this isn’t entirely true. On my Windows machines, it is common for me to have apps that require different versions of Internet Explorer or FireFox. It is hard to manage PCs when one application requires IE9 and another requires IE10. Some work on FireFox but only new versions while other won’t work with anything news that something that was released two years ago.

Sadly, it is still the big names in the business causing most of this havoc.

I recently discovered that the transition from Windows 7 to Ubuntu Linux was easier than the transition from Windows 7 to Windows 8. I still believe that but I ran into new complications.

Adobe Flash is no longer supported under Linux. Java is no longer supported in Chrome on Linux and OS-X. Imagine what that will do to your management capabilities! The vSphere 5.5 web client requires a new version of Flash and thus cannot be managed via Linux. Most of my Dell servers have management cards requiring Java. They are difficult to manage under Linux. I don’t even want to talk about the complexities of using a browser to manage my Cisco gear. Put simply, Linux is awesome but incompatible with many of the web applications available today.

It’s getting so complicated I am tempted to run a bunch of terminal or Citrix servers with specific browser versions so that when a user launches an app, I can launch it in the correct browser and version. What a pain.

If you are a web developer, I beg you, please do not write code that requires a specific browser or version of Java, Flash, etc. The overlapping requirements quickly combine to make it impossible to use every web application we have from a single machine. This is a real problem.

In theory, HTML 5 will save the day but I suspect it will take a decade for people to convert legacy applications to it and by then something else will be the new thing which breaks our applications.

Think carefully about using browser based applications. If you have more than two, you may have to have multiple machines just to be able to use them.

Is Linux or Windows 8 easier to use?

I have been using the original Surface as my laptop since it was released. To mu surprise iy has worked out very well. All of my applications, including odd ones like NMAP, work great. The only thing I dislike is the lack of ports. One USB port makes working with external devices a pain. I have purchased USB adapters so I can connect to devices via serial ports. The one things I have not purchased and that kills me is a USB to Ethernet cable. There are times I cannot be plugged into a docking station and need an Ethernet port. All things considered though, the Surface is a great laptop.

The one thing I still struggle with is Windows 8. (Yes, I updated to Windows 8.1 but it is still a pain to work with.) I open a PDF and it goes into tiles mode. Switching between the desktop and tiles is an insane design at best. Running on the desktop only seems like trying to avoid the inevitable. I have really tried to get comfortable with Windows 8 but the UI is just bad. It is by far the worst UI ever designed simply because you basically are using to operating systems at once.

I needed a laptop with a bunch of ports so I took an abondoned Windows 8 laptop and loaded Ubuntu Linux. (It was harder to delete Windows than it was to load Linux.) To my great surprise the load went well. The laptop had a touch screen which Ubuntu detected. Everything just worked. Installing software and hardening the OS was simple for an IT guy. What amazed me though was the interface.

When I use Linux, I typically don’t even load the GUI. What can I say, I love text only CLI interfaces on Linux. (I hate the Cisco CLI though.)  This was the first time I loaded a GUI on Linux in years. Frankly, the GUI was stunning

In all fairness, the Windows 7 interface is probably easier to use because it is about the same as every other version of Windows going back to 98. I realized that the change from Windows 7 to Ubuntu was minimal while the change form Windows 7 to Windows 8 was gut wrenching.

I am considering doing some A/B testing with users. I believe that if I were to have one group use Ubuntu and another use Windows 8 I would find the Ubuntu crowed more efficient. I might concede that they would be equally proficient but for the cost savings Linux would bring, why not use Linux?

I won’t inflict anything on end user that I won’t inflict on myself. I decided to go rouge and use Ubuntu as my only work laptop.

• Email: Evolution seems to be a fine Outlook replacement. It does everything I need. I don’t know if it will work with Office 365 or newer version of Exchange though. If it doesn’t work, I can live with email on my phone and OWA.
• Web Browsing: Everything but Internet Explorer. If you have to have IE, Linux won’t work.
• JAVA: I have yet to get websites that use JAVA to work on Chrome. I will eventually but that seems to be a pain. (Hints are welcome.)
• Security Tools: NMAP, Wire.Shark, and all my other favorite tools work better on Ubuntu than Windows. I run these on Linux anyway.
• Visio: I love Visio but DIA seems to work well enough for me to diagram everything I need to diagram.
• Office: LibreOffice does everything I need. I have yet to try to load a bunch of my Office docs in Linux but I suspect they will work. If not, I am willing to convert them all over time. I don’t use Office much anyway. I would prefer to use the web apps in either Office 365 or Google Apps anyway.
• RDP: Yep, I can remote control all my servers.
• Putty: I can remote control everything else
• Printing: Paper is dead. I never print. I’ll have to test it at some point though.
• Patching: We use Dell’s KACE system for patching. It works on some flavors of Linux. I still need to test this. If it doesn’t work, I can use the built in patching engine to keep everything updated.
• Encryption: You can encrypt the hard drive during installation making laptop theft less of an issue. Password management might be a pain but so is data loss.

I don’t know if I would throw Ubuntu into production but if Windows 9 isn’t significantly easier to use, it may be hard to justify the cost of Windows anymore.

Are you listening Microsoft?