[aaronblohowiak]

There is always a rendering engine unless you're writing pixels to the buffer directly. The thing is that Cocoa/CocoaTouch's rendering and compositing is much faster than Webkit's. Why that is, is left as an exercise for the reader.

[omarqazi]

Webkit uses iOS's rendering and compositing libraries to render information on screen. That's why it will never be faster than those libraries.