Webapps today are the same. Their characteristic behaviour is rendering the skeleton of their UI, and then greeting you with a spinner. They take about as much to start up as Java Applets did.
Now, consider the orders of magnitude improvement in computing power over the years, and notice that webapps aren't really doing anything more complicated than old applets did...
Now, consider the orders of magnitude improvement in computing power over the years, and notice that webapps aren't really doing anything more complicated than old applets did...