I get your point but I often wonder if by stuffing everything through a networked document renderer hasn't caused a lot of those performance issues.

Rendering a page is expensive enough, but you have a generation of programmers who only know javascript (and for good reason, the web is an incredible software deployment system). But when everything is a web-app, then the renderer that does the parsing and execution needs to be optimised so hard that the code might as well be proprietary.

That's how I feel about chrome. Parsing and rendering websites today is /hard/ and we're not helping things by pushing more and more and more into our browsers. Of course it will become a monopoly.