On the Chrome team we're always looking at ways to better provide access to lower level primitives and machinery to enable you to do things like this. It's a multi-faceted problem however. If you have specific suggestions around alternative layout engines, discourse.specifiction.org is a great place to lay out your suggestions in more detail (not that HN isn't useful for this, but those interested in standards generally frequent the discussion board). Outside of layout engines, we're also looking at enabling developers to do more things they would like to with native hardware. Take a look at https://github.com/w3c-webmob/web-api-gap/tree/master/featur... for feature gaps and efforts to fill them.