[smashface]

If by table-ish layouts you mean using the <table> element to render something like this then browsers might be OK at it but the <table> woefully inadequate to do anything more than the most basic table renderings. Virtual scrolling or frozen rows/columns is a lot of manual work to do on top of a <table>.

[cm2187]

Plus I crashed safari on an ipad with a simple page with a table of a few tens thousand rows.

[smashface]

In my experience, 10K+ rows could even crash a desktop browser.