There's numerous reasons you might be getting bad performance, if you post a capx and your system specs, we could help you better.
If, from the games you mentioned, you're trying to make a side scrolling shooter, you could be running too many collision checks, you might be able to improve things by putting each laser type on its own layer so the graphics card doesn't have to switch textures as often, you might be getting tons of overdraw and hitting the fill rate limits of your graphics card, you might be getting software rendering (you can try updating your graphics card drivers and running the direct x updater. If you're on XP or vista you're getting software rendering in chrome and node webkit regardless, Ashley's looking into ways to fix that)...
You could also put parallax items on the same layer and use the bullet behavior to make them move at different speeds to emulate having tons of layers with parallax instead.
You should probably ask for help and post a .capx before you get so upset! Maybe we can help!