Back in the Netscape 4 days, the architectures of those engines were broadly the same (in the sense that Linux and FreeBSD have broadly the same architecture). Of course the codebases were different.
In the late '90s, the time frame this thread is about, it was well known that the layout engines at the time were not dynamic: they could not in general reflow only parts of the page. Everything else I mentioned in the post that triggered this subthread is obvious simply based on browser engine and OS history.
I don't even know what we're arguing about anymore. Do you dispute this?
> (Netscape 4/Opera/IE) didn't have a JIT, didn't use hardware accelerated layers, trapped into kernel mode for GDI calls, didn't use accelerated SIMD for painting, and didn't have HTTP 2. It barely had any optimizations for dynamic restyling, so tons of stuff would get reflowed when it didn't have to.