Is it just me, or explanations along the lines of "you have a dual core machine" sound utterly cosmic? Guys, we're still talking about an expensive top shelf device that has been struggling with web browsing. Web browsing! Not Large Hadron Collider! So something is very wrong here...
It is easy to bring a system to it's knees with a website. There is not many resource (ex. CPU cycles, disk I/O, GPU cycles, etc) that you can consume in a application running natively on Mac, that cannot also be consumed in a web site. The difference is the web site has an interpreter in between the demand and the resources, making the consumption of those resources even more inefficient. Also, you more likely to consume network connection resources with a web site.
Here is a simple example. Website X uses several framework libraries to display pages. Before the webpage can start it musst download those libraries to the computer. This involves pulling them from a repository somewhere on the web (network I/O), unpacking them (CPU cycles), interpreting them (more CPU cycles), and repeating all of this for each element on the page. If one of those elements happens to be a video, add video resources (CPU, GPU, memory) as it is loaded and streamed to the device (network I/O), and played( GPU, CPU). And if there are multiple video ads on the page, the load can get very high for the CPU, GPU, and network. Add to this load, ads based on tracking (Google, Amazon, etc) and the resource consumption can really soar.