motorhaven - 1:21 am on Nov 16, 2009 (gmt 0)

I don't think hardware resources will be an issue, given the stable nature of web protocols and their installment on literally millions of systems, I doubt we'll see any browsers without backwards compatibility with existing protocols for a long, long time.

Those with the extra capacity will adopt it (maybe), those without won't.

Also, depending on the nature of the resource useage sometimes things like this can actually decrease resources. For example, if the limiting factor is RAM and/or maximum number of available TCP connections, any protocol which transmits the page faster will free up connections quicker and reduce RAM usage.

A good example is gzip/deflate compression. Technically it uses more resources but I've had high load systems which saw a decrease. More connections available/idle during peak times and as a result, more RAM available for disk caching. Compression made these systems faster, especially since they had many pages/scripts which could easily swamp a small disk cache.