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Designing modern web applications involves a wide spectrum of choices when it comes to deciding where the different tiers of application and framework code that constitute these distributed applications should be placed. These system design choices affect programmer productivity, ease of deployment, security, and performance, particularly with respect to latency and scalability. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a design choice in which not only all application logic executes server-side, but most presentation logic as well. The client browser is reduced to a rendering and I/O engine, similar to a "thin client" or \dumb terminal," but retains the full expressiveness of rich, modern Internet applications. We have developed CloudBrowser 2.0, a system that implements this distribution model using a scalable multiprocess approach. In this paper, we perform an evaluation of the benefits and costs of this approach when compared to both more traditional approaches as well as emerging alternatives. We focus on programmability and systems aspects including performance and latency.