vSphere 6.5 VMware introduced html5 support.

In older release VMware was providing two types of clients:

– vSphere Client [ exe installer]

– vSphere Web client [flash based]

vSphere Client, from vSphere 5.5 onwards started  providing lot of restriction. VMware stopped latest virtual hardware vendor support, other core feature configuration from vSphere client.

In case of vSphere Web client [flash based], its performance was not up to mark to handle big environment. This flash based solution has lot of performance issues.

In vSphere 6.5, VMware has two types of clients:

HTML5 [vSphere client]

Flash [vSphere Web Client]

HTML5 [vSphere client]:VMware agrees that Flash is not the solution for the long-term. Our long-term direction is to utilize HTML5. In vSphere 6.5, we have released a supported version of an HTML5 based web client which we call “vSphere Client”. The vSphere Client is part of the vCenter Server (both appliance and Windows) and is configured to work out of the box.

Access Url:  https://<ip or fqdn of VC>/ui

Note:This HTML5 based client was originally released as a fling back in March 2016 and has been releasing a new version every week.

https://labs.vmware.com/flings/vsphere-html5-web-client#instructions

vSphere Web Client: The vSphere Client (HTML5) released in vSphere 6.5 has a subset of features of the vSphere Web Client (Flash/Flex). Until the vSphere Client achieves feature parity, we might continue to enhance and/or add new features to vSphere Web Client.

https://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2016/12/new-vcenter-management-clients-vsphere-6-5.html