I remember trying to figure out why video playback was so horribly slow in Chrome on an ARM device. Streaming the video with mplayer would take around 60% CPU t

I remember trying to figure out why video playback was so horribly slow in Chrome on an ARM device. Streaming the video with mplayer would take around 60% CPU time (out of 400%), but playing it in Chrome it would max out at 400% and start dropping frames. In the end the answer was that each video frame had to be copied between buffers about three times with Chrome, among other things, whereas mplayer was able to draw directly to the framebuffer. Now I'm not saying it isn't theoretically possible to make this fast (and Chrome has various optimizations nowadays for a select number of platforms), but abstractions can be expensive - especially for video. It's best to go as native as possible if you're on underpowered hardware or want to go easy on your user's battery life.