Why are web browsers so resource hungry, What are they actually doing?

[Orionaut]

As above really.

I have a couple of Gigabyte "Brix", I use them for office applications and they are nice and snappy with openoffice and the small number of other applications that I run on them.

But the internet is a total waste of time.

These are twin core 1.6Gig CPU's and yet, when I look in Task Manager, the CPU is maxed out loading a web page, and despite that it can still take a minute or more before the little round thing stops spinning.

What on earth are these browsers doing?? The data stream after all is only a tiny fraction of what a DL from an SSD would be (Which is handled with ease)

Are we really heading into a world where we need a supercomputer to look at a web page??

 

[Orionaut]

Have to say I agree. The only constant is OcUK, the rest of the net hasn't really improved with all the crud that comes with it.

Since you mention it, OCUK seems to load quickly and without issues. /:

But I am still puzzled as to what the CPU is doing maxed out on a 5 meg data stream??

I could understand if pages were slow to load because there was loads of data and the transfer was slow, I do not however understand what all the CPU time is being used for??