It can be better to use divs instead of tables in some situations, especially when you want to display thousands of rows inside of a relatively complex DOM structure. All browsers seem to render them faster, but in Chrome specifically there are bugs like this: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=461877 and one that can trigger a huge cascade of recursive style recalculations (which in practice freezes browsers for a few seconds). Virtual scrolling is another way of avoiding this problem but it can be tricky if you don't know the height of the rows.

Last year I had to build a UI with several thousand rows in a data grid. Of course I used a table for this, since tables are for displaying tabular data! Once I got a full set of production data into it, scrolling the page absolutely crushed the browser, running at about three frames per second. I believe the issue was actually caused by a parent element with overflow: scroll-y, but switching to divs made it run smooth as butter.

This table rendering bug still haunts me

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8474678/ie9-strange-tabl...