If Jailbroken and you have 99 cents, you can install Nitrous in Cydia to get nitro everywhere. It gave me 3.5x faster performance on Sunspider.

But even if not, how many mobile websites use heavy JS? Chrome appears to use page pre-fetching as well, or at least that's what I gather from the "preload webpages" setting.

Doesn't excuse its irritatingly outdated UI.

not if you jailbreak :P

search for "nitrous" on cydia