Power 7 CPU - 8 cores

[commodorejohn]

Out of your example, web browsing is the only one that really needs a performance boost. With javascript and compressed video, there is definitely a need for more performance & there is no reason that can't be by using more cores.

Yeah, web browsers are definitely moreso than the other examples. On the other hand, half the reason that's even true is because of the omnipresence of terribly slow (and almost always completely unnecessary) Javascript in modern websites, so even though there is a benefit from a properly multithreaded browser, it's mostly in making bad code less crippling.
 

The future is multiple cores for general purpose computing, programmers will need to adapt.

Again, I'm not arguing that multicore isn't a good thing; it's lovely for what it is. It's just not an Ultimate Solution to the fact that eventually computers are going to reach a point of maximum practically-attainable power, and all the people who have been blithely counting on Moore's Law to cover for their many, many sins of bloat and shoddy coding and poor optimization are going to run straight into that wall at full steam and then start crying about having to learn to be efficient again.

[commodorejohn]

On some of my x86s some windows did not even manage to install itself, etc, etc. Linux went in far more smoothly. Booted faster and was stabler.
I think I've had thousand crashes with windows and only a few with linux (+ perhaps hundred crash of the Linux desktop GUI, that really is not linux fault).

Well that's lovely for you. Doesn't change the fact that I've had XP bluescreen exactly once, and that on account of a crap video driver, while I lost hours of work to sudden core-dumps during my switchover attempts. (And that's not even counting the years during which I was using DSLinux as a portable text editor.)

And modern linux remembers what you had running when you powered off, it can restore your work's state pretty nicely.

Beg pardon, are you telling me that it actually maintains enough stability in a crash to instruct applications to save your work, and then dumps and reboots? Because merely remembering what I had running is peanuts - I can remember what I had running without help.

[commodorejohn]

I'm not going to defend every use of javascript as there are some very bad examples out there. However there will always be good uses for it and because websites have become more important, web browsers are becoming more standardised so we're unlikely to see major shifts in the the way websites are designed. HTML5 is mainly just a load of old technologies that have been standardised. I blame tim berners lee, but they knighted him.

There are indeed some good uses for it - and they aren't the problem. Good Javascript, when it can be found, does only what static page content and server-side scripting can't, and does so efficiently, such that even an old browser can handle it. (I can log into GMail from iWeb on my A1200, for example.) The problem is bad Javascript, which is far more common, almost omnipresent in these days of glitz-focused "Web 2.0" design.

Bad Javascript eats up CPU cycles like popcorn, usually for no other purpose than to make "dynamic" a page that would have been perfectly fine static, or to badly reimplement basic browser functionality. (There is nothing in the world that makes me want to harm my fellow man the way Javascript links do.) The only way to avoid it is to have a Javascript whitelist feature such as NoScript, because it's currently still illegal to kill someone for bad web design. And it gets worse every year.

Good Javascript needs no special measures to work. Bad Javascript is the primary (almost the only) reason people keep having to throw more horsepower at a web browser.

As far as HTML5 goes, I know that HTML4 needed a cleanup, but this just gives more free reign to bad Javascript programmers. It isn't what was needed in the slightest.