Actually performance is suffering if you run it on a system with a not-so-good GPU. Intel GPUs are known for their poor WebGL performance.
The performance with wireframe rendering would be the same. The difference is that Andrew is simulating 150 points in CPU whereas this simulates ~260k in the GPU. On my 2008 laptop with NVidia GPU it runs at 60 FPS.
A bit faster in Chrome than Firefox but still not realtime.
I guess wireframe has exponentially less work to do http://andrew-hoyer.com/experiments/cloth/