Although its really difficult to fathom how loading a webpage takes billions of cycles anyhow. It never used to. Remember the Internet in 2000? Pages are getting slower despite broadband speeds going through the roof and processors getting faster and there being so much more RAM etc.
Yep, I remember trying to optimize my 1-pixel spacer GIF from 53 bytes down to 47 bytes to lighten up the load of a 200KB page of random interwoven table, font, and center tags that took 30-60 seconds to download.