We just don’t know how bad slow browsers can be because all others have caught up.
During that time IE startup time went from a dozen or so seconds to also instantaneous. It was even faster than chrome sometimes. But that was just the startup. The application wasn’t ready to accept any user input or load anything for another 10 or 15 seconds still. Sometimes it would even accept input for a second then block the input fields again.
It’s the same mentality all those insanely slow webapps do when they think some core react feature for a “initial render” or splash screen etc will save them from their horrific engineering practices.
As I recall they cheated by actually starting IE at login time. Window creation is easy to make quick...
A system with less than 64 Megabytes of RAM (most computers of the time) would have to lean heavily on spinning rust virtual memory, making everything slow.
However, since then Chrome has become one of the biggest memory hogs that people commonly run.
Windows Vista, for example, required 512MB but really needed 1GB or more to work.
A year latter, in 2009, Windows 7 was launched, it required 1GB at minimum, but really needed 4GB or more.