Sure but D3 is a bit of a workaround. It can animate SVGs (well any DOM node) but doesn't create animated SVGs. By more or less requiring Javascript with a DO

Sure but D3 is a bit of a workaround. It can animate SVGs (well any DOM node) but doesn't create animated SVGs. By more or less requiring Javascript with a DOM implementation you're limiting D3's use case to browsers. Server side rendering becomes more tedious. D3 is a poor fit for something like an application dock where you don't necessarily want a whole HTML rendering engine. Performance is definitely dependent on environment. For visualizations that use simple shapes like area and bar charts, force directed graphs, etc. SVG performance is pretty decent across the board. If you need to use complex shapes like for a cloropleth or globe, Safari chokes. I don't use Chrome anymore so I can't compare, but Firefox will happily render and animate a globe using relatively detailed (1:50m) data. With Safari you need to go out to 1:110m to get passable performance. Let's not even get into Safari's atrocious font handling... ugh.