[dspillett]

> I don't think that's accurate. It was old Internet Explorer that wouldn't render tables progressively.

IIRC Netscape didn't either around the IE4/5 days. It also had significant performance problems with large sets of nested tables which IE6 (and perhaps IE5) did not.

For example back at University on 133MHz Pentium-class CPUs a large slashdot page with all threads open could take minutes to render where IE took merely a noticeable number of seconds - a co-student use to make a big thing of this as a reason to dump other browsers and use IE. There was actually a use case for this away from the University's fixed line connection: on dial up you could, RAM+swap and browser-not-crashing permitting, open a couple of windows like that then disconnect the modem and read at your leisure without racking up a per-minute phone bill.

Or maybe NS was capable of progressive display and this was just hidden in extreme cases by the performance issue, that was a time ago and memory is hazy…

[slapo]

I haven't worked with Netscape that old, only some time after it became free of charge, but I remember it was really slow at just about anything compared to IE 5.5 and 6 - startup, rendering, UI. To the point that even if it could render tables progressively, it wouldn't really matter on my computer (which I think was either an Intel Penium II or an AMD Duron 850), despite only having a dial-up connection.

I think it was around the time of Firefox 1.6 when it felt like it was about on par with IE 6 in rendering speed for me, after tweaking some of its settings. I think it was also rendering tables progressively at the time.