HTML5 for Azure RemoteApp Review

Microsoft recently announced the public preview of their HTML5 'client' for Azure RemoteApp. Freek Berson, RDS MVP, shares his experiences.

Browse to https://www.remoteapp.windowsazure.com/web and click on Try Now. The HTML5 portal which will show the applications that are assigned to your user based on the Azure RemoteApp collection membership.

To launch a RemoteApp, simply click the icon. Similar to the installed Azure RemoteApp client, or any generic RemoteApp environment, the launch of the 1st application will take a little bit longer because the user session has to be logged on, the UPD has to be mounted et cetera. Any subsequent application you launch is almost instant.

When you launch the application below is what you will see during the launch of the user session. In my lab (West Europe Azure Datacenter) the 1st launch took ~14 seconds.

Freek was pretty amazed by the smooth experience, especially since this is only the 1st preview. Obviously, the experience is not exactly the same compared to the installed client, this is true for any HTML5 client out there in the market.

Some of the current limitations for the HTML5 preview:

• To access HTML5, currently only Edge and Chrome can be used. IE support is coming in a few days and Firefox is coming later in January.
• Currently, only Hybrid (Domain Joined) scenarios are supported. There is no support for Cloud (non-Domain Joined) scenario's yet. Non-domain joined cloud deployments support is coming later in January.
• In the current preview there is no redirection yet of Printers, Local drives, Audio, Clipboard et cetera.

Complete story at the source: http://microsoftplatform.blogspot.nl/2016/01/html5-for-azure-remoteapp-available-in.html