The most remarkable part of &quot;web apps&quot; is probably what they <i>do not</i> improve on:<p>Smalltalk had (has) messaging and decent object orientation (and you have that especially in latest js) - but Smalltalk never had <i>one</i> standard vm implementation - different versions had different image (ram-saved-to-disk, source code and byte-code) and vms. Javascript has common source code, but no common vm&#x2F;image format.<p>Office Suites had rich documents with smart(ish) widgets, but no security - a macro in Excel had access to all your spreadsheet data. Web apps don&#x27;t really have any good encapsulation either -- so we&#x27;ll likely repeat the macro-virus era with web virus era (I&#x27;m not sure if we already are or not, there&#x27;s certainly been a few self-replicating ones, that eg spread via facebook updates etc. Not sure if they generally live in the phone-apps or various web-apps. Probably both).<p>We already had the future of web applications within reach years ago - but apparently no-one cared: <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lively-kernel.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;lively-kernel.org&#x2F;</a>