The performance of JavaScript in browsers can be considered the most important usability issue faced by developers. This problem is compounded by the blocking nature of JavaScript, which means that other things cannot be processed by the browser while JavaScript is running. In fact, most browsers use a single process to handle multiple tasks such as UI updates and JavaScript running, and only one task can be executed at the same time.
How long the JavaScript is running, then how long it waits before the browser is idle to respond to user input.
At a basic level, this means that the presence of the