It wasn't just JS, you could actually watch JPEG images becoming decoded, esp. on a computer which wasn't exactly new. Layout of complex markup could take secon

It wasn't just JS, you could actually watch JPEG images becoming decoded, esp. on a computer which wasn't exactly new. Layout of complex markup could take seconds, reflowing and repainting was out of question. JS as an interpreteded language was accordingly much slower than native code. There was no way to do fast, declarative HTML in JS – and not much of a use case for this. (For much the same reasons, there was no way to have optimizing client-side JS engines, even if JS hadn't been just in its infancy.)