Didn't you see The Astronaut Farmer? The government won't just let you build your own rocket...

Seriously though, NASA has placed restrictions in the past and it just recently became more open.

Look at the human genome project, private sector is doing better.

Plus the private sector will always invest if there is potential profit, THAT is the beauty of capitalism. :-)

That depends on what you consider performance. Yes there is some overhead, mostly memory but memory is cheap. I'd rather use more memory and have a faster and more stable browser. Then again, if Firefox fixed their memory management problems it would probably be faster and more stable.

Not sure how having the Chrome tabs and pages use different UI code makes it easier to crash. A website shouldn't ever modify the OS UI parts. The separate memory space feature isn't a killall solution but it does make it less susceptible to some exploits. Session cookies aren't shared between tabs.