[geezerjay]

> Taking advantage of so many extra cores by a single process is not all that easy or common.

Browsers are both multiprocess and multithreaded. The ability to run a few webapps without having your system drag to a halt is a feature that's important to essentially everyone.

[la_barba]

>The ability to run a few webapps without having your system drag to a halt is a feature that's important to essentially everyone.

Webapps such as? I have a 4 core CPU from 2014 (i7-4790K) and I can't recall that ever happening to me. Primarily because any modern OS will throttle crazy runaway threads to ensure UI responsiveness, so the system doesn't 'drag to a halt' as you claim.

Also honestly.. how many people are looking at CPU benchmarks to run browsers better? I'd wager a twenty that its mostly gaming nerds who are obsessed with CPU benchmarks. Then.. its also a question of knowing your audience. I'm sure they have a better idea of who their audience is than you or I.

[xemdetia]

Gmail is the #1 culprit for completely locking some of my lesser systems (i5-7200U). I also have the fun thing sometimes where opening a large PDF or Google Doc can take an unreasonable amount of resources from the rest of the system for processing. I had Facebook do it constantly for a period where I made the bad decision to use it for a while. I find a good bit of information from benchmarks for non-desktop processors/whole system configurations, especially when a new feature set/generation swings the difference between an i3 and an i5 for instance.

"Primarily because any modern OS will throttle crazy runaway threads to ensure UI responsiveness" seems like you have a particular OS in mind, and I would be interested in hearing more. I do not observe that behaviour on Debian 9 (and other Linux distros), Mac OS X, and Windows 7/8. I regularly bring any of those to UI stuttering/freeze from various workloads. Webapps only really breaks the lesser ones singlehandedly though (most of my other systems are 4+ core with 32GB+ RAM).