A client is nothing but a requesting application or a user, which is trying to make some contact with the main sever. It is with the help of the network that the client manages to establish contact with the servers. The word “client” was used for the first time when it was found that some systems weren’t able to run programs all by themselves. However, the programs ran only when computers were connected through a network. Even today, the client server modules are used and this becomes more than evident when we look at the Internet since Internet uses the same concept.

With respect to the Internet, the user is able to avail the services of the World Wide Web simply through an IP suite. In this case, the web browsers are nothing but the clients which simply connect to the web servers and display the respective pages to the user. When the users want to retrieve their e-mails, they use the e-mail clients from the ISP’s storage servers. These clients always vary according to the applications they are used for. For instance, the clients used for online chats usually depends on what kind of chat protocol is being used. And with respect to online games, well, game clients are usually used for multi player online games.

There has been a change off lately in the sense that client programs are tagged along with websites, which makes the browsers act like universal clients making the entire process easy for the users. This is achieved due to the fact that instead of communicating with separate servers all the time, it is easier to connect through a browser and this is clear from the advancement of web mail. There are three types of clients, they are, Fat Clients, Hybrid Clients and of course, Thin Clients. The fat client is mostly used by users for their personal computers since they are known to operate solo. On the other hand, the thin client uses other resources and all it does is just display the images from the server. And then of course you have the hybrid client which is a combo of the above two client types. This way, the hybrid clients offer enhanced performance, multimedia compatibility and flexibility.