I hope 2015 is the year JS devs really start pushing for real async/threaded support in the browser. I was working on the reapp HN reader app[0] for the last few days attempting to find out why Safari would choke for up to 20 seconds on displaying ~500 DOM nodes, and this article just sparked an idea which turned out to be true: flex-box was causing it.

Switching to display: 'block' and it's under 100ms. I think now I'll look at using css-layout to just spit out absolute positions.

I also appreciate the shout out in the article to reapp. I've spend the last few days working with WebWorkers, which have some interesting potential, but without access to the UI are going to be tricky to implement. Again, the React guys have gotten something working, and we had an interesting conversation about using Flux to communicate between Workers/main thread, which I'll be exploring.

Long and short of it is this: We've gotten pretty damn close with the web these days. For anything that doesn't use exceeding long lists of media-heavy content, you can actually get 60fps with react. But you have to be careful.

I'd love to see UI workers, async DOM ops, and even Canvas support for better accessibility. Web developers should all be writing and voting up articles like this.

[0] http://hn.reapp.io