[jopsen]

I hope it's just a matter of time before browsers start to throttle sites...

Or maybe search rankings will be affected by CPU usage, and bandwidth.

[flukus]

Chrome has added throttling for inactive tabs. The problem is this is an active tab open for long stretches of time doing a somewhat cpu intensive task, so throttling isn't an option. I also doubt that be too adversely affected by slipping down the search rankings in this case.

[hubcaps]

Bandwidth and loads time already do play a part in search rankings, at least with Google.

[swsieber]

Which is a lot easier toeasure than long running CPU usage unfortunately (at least not without privacy concerns - e.g. getting real world data from users)