Browsers (and machines) were slower then so it didn't finish as fast as it does today. Also, it's hard to decide what steps to illustrate/count. Is a swap 1 step (swap) or 4 (load slot N to R1, load slot M to R2, store R1 in M, store R2 in N) etc...
Those choices (what counts as a step) are interesting because e.g. for my quicksort they make it look median-of-3 is about as fast as median-of-ninthers (it's not it's significantly faster), which would make my strategy of starting with median-of-3 and doing a round of ninthers for pathological input a bit absurd.
The visualization was still incredibly useful (I found) in getting a sense that the algorithm is working correctly. You can clearly see how median-of-ninthers is working in that gif.
https://greggman.github.io/doodles/sort
Browsers (and machines) were slower then so it didn't finish as fast as it does today. Also, it's hard to decide what steps to illustrate/count. Is a swap 1 step (swap) or 4 (load slot N to R1, load slot M to R2, store R1 in M, store R2 in N) etc...