The grid benchmark from the Google spreadsheets team is slow The google spreadsheets team does a variety things to make gigantic spreadsheets responsive in the browser, including not even loading the whole spreadsheet into the DOM at once. They provided Darin (and through Darin, me) a tiny benchmark which use innerHTML repeatedly to update a table, in a similar manner to how at least some versions of spreadsheet handle scrolling. Looking at this microbenchmark in a sampler shows some low hanging fruit which I've filed as separate bugs and blocked here.