said by dlewis23 :

There really isn't anything that wrong with the way the internet works at the moment, if you really want to "speed things up" you have to improve the browser and get people to update from IE6.

said by wifi4milez :

Google does have their own browser (called Chrome), and they claim its much faster than IE.

AJAX heavy apps will frequently max out a single core of my Q9300 (2.5GHz) quad-core and cause everything else the app is trying to do to have to wait.

said by dlewis23 :

There really isn't anything that wrong with the way the internet works at the moment, if you really want to "speed things up" you have to improve the browser

said by djrobx :

True, although at the moment I like that "feature". On my quad core PC, the last thing I want is a single browser window containing some poorly written, buggy advertising code hogging up the whole machine.

said by djrobx :

True, although at the moment I like that "feature". On my quad core PC, the last thing I want is a single browser window containing some poorly written, buggy advertising code hogging up the whole machine.

said by avd706 :

this is why chrome runs each tab as a thread

said by Matt :

Yes, but that still can't speed up an individual AJAX app. That only helps if you're running multiple AJAX applications.

said by tschmidt :

Improving delivery speed opens the door to new Internet applications that are not possible at slower speed.

/tom

said by dlewis23 :

But for the most part now servers are connected at 100 Mbps minimum. And when with people now having 10 Mbps + at home the speed is there. The browser can't render it fast enough to take full advantage of what the connection can give the browser.

said by FastiBook :

Flash & java are huge cpu hogs, they need to be refined & not used as widely, especially in ads. Load a page, have computer act like it came from 1992 from cpu lag.

- A

said by Matt :

It's not the computer itself that is brought to it's knees, but rather the browser since most older browsers are ALSO not multi-core aware.

said by wifi4milez :

That is partially true. What happens is that the browser ends up using all the available memory, and thus the whole computer slows down. Check your task manager next time your computer is crawling along, I can almost guarantee its because IE or FF is using up 99% of your available resources....

said by Matt :

That is an old memory leak that has been fixed since FF 2.x at least. It was definitely a problem in the past, but not anymore. Just open a ridiculous flash heavy MySpace profile and look at your resources. You'll see memory usage around 100-200MB and a single core maxed. You can still use your OS, but your browser will respond slowly.

We have a very heavy AJAX based application so I have to test this stuff all the time. The browser really is doing a ton more than it was designed to do.