> [...] the browser runtime environment which includes a slow and complex DOM
Counter to this narrative the DOM is very fast, and compared to many other platforms it's much faster at displaying a large number of views and then resizing and reflowing them.
ex. Android warns when there's more than 80 Views, meanwhile Gmail is 3500 DOM elements and the new "fast" Facebook is ~6000 DOM elements. Neither of those apps spends the majority of their time in the browser code on load, it's almost entirely JS. Facebook spends 3 seconds running script on page load on my $3k Macbook Pro. That's not because the DOM is slow, that's because Facebook runs a lot of JS on startup.
Counter to this narrative the DOM is very fast, and compared to many other platforms it's much faster at displaying a large number of views and then resizing and reflowing them.
ex. Android warns when there's more than 80 Views, meanwhile Gmail is 3500 DOM elements and the new "fast" Facebook is ~6000 DOM elements. Neither of those apps spends the majority of their time in the browser code on load, it's almost entirely JS. Facebook spends 3 seconds running script on page load on my $3k Macbook Pro. That's not because the DOM is slow, that's because Facebook runs a lot of JS on startup.
If you cut down to the metal browsers can be quite fast, ex. https://browserbench.org/MotionMark/