Hyper-competition to make a faster browser and faster websites has to be a factor. In the days of packaged software, you might be happy to get a handful of per

Hyper-competition to make a faster browser and faster websites has to be a factor. In the days of packaged software, you might be happy to get a handful of performance updates before a flashy (and more CPU-intensive) new version came out, but any web service worth its salt is built to load almost instantly; snappy usability is important when competition is a click away. And just think of how much horsepower has been saved by abandoning Flash. The end result is that the average software user (Facebook, Google, Gmail/Hotmail, etc.) has probably seen the software they use actually get faster in the last 10 years.