Nice, short but sweet article by Google web development advocate Paul Lewis on some simple, essential rules to maximize performance on your web pages. The best part is midway down, labeled “avoid performance bottlenecks”:
A while back I wrote an article with Paul Irish on HTML5 Rocks explaining how you can get high performance animations, or in this case, how you can exploit the pipeline to make sure you hit 60fps. What it boils down to is only changing properties that trigger compositing rather than layout or paint.