NeWS was a lovely thing (and the HyperNeWS environment that was built on it is still one of all time favourite frameworks) but I'm not sure it was directly comparable with HTML+JS+AJAX - it was more like an attempt to do a better X11.
Specifically I don't remember (even, ironically given its name, in HyperNews) there being much support for working with documents or hyperlinks. Mind you - it did do the client side scripting in a wonderful way (at least if PostScript is your thing).
I also seem to remember that it didn't have a particularly strong security model?
Indeed, NeWS was at the level of X11, but tuned to the hardware and networking set up we ended up having instead of the DEC 11/750<-very fast fiberoptic link->[display head with a 68000, 1MiB of memory, ~1 megapixels, i.e. pretty dumb, all this to get around government procurement law], but with Sun insisting on 6 figures to license it, it didn't have a chance.
Supposedly the major reason James Gosling insisted Sun not charge for Java runtimes and the SDK, he didn't want another major effort of his to fail for the same reason.
They are all variants on the cross-platform thin-client theme. The HTML+JS+AJAX conglomeration has certainly more in common with NeWS than it does with the web I remember in 1994, which was a solution to the problem of sharing and cross referencing scientific papers and similar documents.
Yeah - I suppose that is fair. Certainly with HyperNeWS the fun[1] was creating a user interface interactively and then connecting it to your back end application via message passing.
1. And it certainly was fun - HyperNeWS was brilliant (e.g. I remember drawing a "broken window" of multiple unconnected parts, pasting it as the shape of a terminal window and everything continued to work - this was '91 or '92).
Also I vaguely remember logging into another users environment and manually tweaking the transformation matrix for the terminal window they were using to rotate it very slightly as they were working...
Specifically I don't remember (even, ironically given its name, in HyperNews) there being much support for working with documents or hyperlinks. Mind you - it did do the client side scripting in a wonderful way (at least if PostScript is your thing).
I also seem to remember that it didn't have a particularly strong security model?