Back in 1998 I had a computer with 233MHz Pentium MMX CPU and a GFX card with no 3D acceleration. It was able to run games like Quake II at a decent FPS rate. My current computer has tons more performance and a mid-class GPU, yet struggles to reach 20 FPS when rendering a single model inside a skybox with WebGL. Even regular pages with lots of 2D CSS animations bring many modern computers to their metaphorical knees.

As a web developer I understand there's a lot going on in a web page but not what makes it that heavy. Modern browsers compile JavaScript to CPU native machine code before running it and rendering into a canvas element shouldn't trigger DOM rebuilds so theoretically it should be a lot faster than it is.

What am I missing here and is it possible to avoid or minimize whatever is making the browsers slow to build more efficient websites?