[Touche]

They made poor initial design decisions which effectively put a speed limit on JavaScript apps. Currently they are not motivated to do the probably very difficult work it would take to fix the problem, that's why it's so important that the Chrome team gets its shit together and makes the speed of Chrome Android awesome (which, to their credit, is a goal for this year).

Unfortunately the lack of competition on mobile makes innovation very slow, there's no motivation to make rapid improvements.

[x1024]

It's really easy to "fix the problem". There have been fixes on Jailbroken devices for years.

[maxmcd]

I'm not going to make an assumptions about how hard it is for apple to solve the problem, but I'm sure people writing solutions for jailbroken devices have a much greater degree of flexibility when it comes to making changes to the OS.