Notable cases of excessive reflows:
Hovering over the sidebar links in gmail (updates almost the entire page on each hover)
Hovering over "related videos" links on youtube (updates all of the related videos area, area around the video, video description, and comment area)
A lot of the javascript powered animations/slideshows you see on web pages. (Again, its not uncommon to see almost the entire page being updated here)
A few IE test drive tests like BetaFishIE, Santa's workshop, and the CSS maze solver.
When the above bug is fixed, Gecko should be much better in all of these cases.
there is also no way this ipad will have great gaming perf at that resolution.
you would have to run games at a less than native resolution then upscale it to fit the screen which looks really bad.
Graphics perfomence on this machine will take a very large nosedive overall if you use fullscreen apps at that native resolution. Mobile Gpus simply arnt up to the task of filling that resolution at a good enough rate for anything other than simple graphics.
Hardware acceleration for Canvas and SVG makes a huge difference in this case.
Firefox 4+ (Windows Vista/7), IE9+ (Windows Vista/7), Chrome(I forget which version)+ (All Windows, Mac Soon), and Safari 5+ (OSX) all support hardware acceleration of Canvas.
Opera development builds support hardware acceleration too.
Chrome Beta on Android supports hardware acceleration of Canvas.
iPhone 4S also supports hardware acceleration of Canvas.
Hardware accelerated Canvas completely destroys Flash on the Desktop.
A lot has changed in `~2 years
Not to mention that modern JS engines outperform even statically typed AS3 code.
Of course, if you don't have a supported graphics card for your computer, you won't get hardware acceleration.
However, I imagine this won't be a problem on Mobile once Android 4.0 eclipses other versions of Android since Hardware acceleration is a standard Android 4.0 feature.
"As for the speed, there's no reason that a lot of dynamic languages couldn't be as fast as LuaJIT. But none of them are even close. I wish LuaJIT was still up in the computer language shootout. The LuaJIT interpreter (with JIT turned off) is 3x faster than V8 on the PC, and faster than Java on Android. And that's the interpreter - the JITed code is way faster."
[Citation Needed]
I know of old benchmarks (pre Crankshaft) that showed the interpreter being faster than V8, but my own tests using the same benchmarks from the computer language shootout show V8 to be about 1.5x faster than luaJIT now.
That bug is getting close to being done. It fixes a lot of crappyness with excessive layout reflows and painting.
You can see how sometimes Gecko will reflow a much larger area than needed by setting nglayout.debug.paint_flashing to true or installing the following addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/toggle-paint-...
Notable cases of excessive reflows: Hovering over the sidebar links in gmail (updates almost the entire page on each hover) Hovering over "related videos" links on youtube (updates all of the related videos area, area around the video, video description, and comment area) A lot of the javascript powered animations/slideshows you see on web pages. (Again, its not uncommon to see almost the entire page being updated here) A few IE test drive tests like BetaFishIE, Santa's workshop, and the CSS maze solver.
When the above bug is fixed, Gecko should be much better in all of these cases.