Do active objects in a Web browser even make sense?

Probably not. Why would programmers want to constrain themselves to applet/plugin/ActiveX development environments?
Instead, just use your programming language of choice to build stand-alone applications communicating directly with the server.
If programming language of choice is object oriented, can we objects between client and server? Sure!
And what how do we tie this back to the web? Make use HTTP on the client talking to existing servers.
- HTTP - easily implemented for client languages. Servers are widely, freely available. A significant amount of invention already done on servers, and continuing.

Patrick J. Mueller (pmuellr@acm.org)
OOPSLA '96 Workshop on "Toward the integration of WWW and Distributed Object Technology"