Presto (the old Opera engine) had a mode called "delayed script execution" which would speculate even harder than the gecko/servo approach. As I understand it —

Presto (the old Opera engine) had a mode called "delayed script execution" which would speculate even harder than the gecko/servo approach. As I understand it — which might well be incorrectly — it would continue treebuilding after a script tag, and then if the script ran a document.write it would check if it produced something that wouldn't affect subsequent tokenisation (or, presumably alter the treebuilding state) and if so patch the tree in-place rather than throwing it away and restarting. It was never debugged enough to be turned on on desktop, but I think it was considered useful enough to ship on mobile in the days when mobile performance was significantly worse than it is today. In particular, on a network where request latency is high having to pause treebuilding for scripts to download can significantly increase the time until it's possible to paint anything at all on the screen.