We've had VMs for webapps, more or less: Java Applets, Flash, Silverlight. They've all been deficient too, and Javascript on top of the DOM with HTML/CSS has wo

We've had VMs for webapps, more or less: Java Applets, Flash, Silverlight. They've all been deficient too, and Javascript on top of the DOM with HTML/CSS has won out. I don't think changing the url protocol would make a difference (and people will still want to embed apps in html pages, and interoperate with JS on those pages.) I don't know what the answer is, and I agree with you that a huge part of the problem is that trying to build web applications on a platform intended for web documents doesn't work very well. But it seems to work better than everything else we've tried.