The document discusses the evolution of web applications from thin clients with fat servers to more balanced architectures. New browser technologies like HTML5, faster JavaScript engines, local storage, and offline capabilities allow more processing to be done locally on the client. This enables richer interfaces, offline usage, and more balanced work distribution between the client and server. It provides examples of how a web application may utilize these new capabilities, such as storing data locally and caching interfaces while communicating with a server via JSON.