Brendan Eich is working on something similar - https://brave.com/

You almost got me scared there! I was going to switch to Brave on my tablet to get better power saving / faster experience via adblocking. However, having blockchain in the browser would defeat the whole thing, making everything much slower instead.

Luckily, they only seem to incorporate BAT, which is fully opt-in, and seems to have no overhead for regular users.

FYI - using the Metamask plugin with Chrome/Firefox (which allows you to use DApps; Elph is basically just combining the two) does not slow anything down. I'm not sure exactly how it works, but it is definitely not the same thing as keeping a Bitcoin or Ethereum node running.

Not really, Brave is quite different. Not sure if you read the article, but what they mean by "Netscape for crypto" is more like "the first mass accessible way to use crypto" instead of "Chrome for crypto"

Yep and it definitely makes sense for this type of product to start as regular browser like Brave and slowly incorporate both