[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.