Personally, I don't remember a time WebKit/Tear was faster than it is now, for me. In fact, I used to find it slower, particularly because the smearing problem used to be much worse (I used to think the name "Tear" was poking fun at the smearing problem - as in, "tearing" - and that it was part of the concept ...).

Right now, my only regret with regard to Tear is me being to lazy to build the latest SVN code .