I don't have a copy of Netscape 4.7 handy (I'm running 6.2 here), but there is a major difference between the way IE and older Netscape handles the rendering of pages that effects the perceived download time of a page. When a browser is trying to render a page, it needs to know the dimensions of each image. If this information is included in the HTML source, it can draw the page before the image is downloaded. Otherwise, the browser must download the image before it knows the pixel dimensions of the image. When IE does not yet know the size of an image, it renders the page without it and redraws the page later after it downloaded the image. Older versions of Netscape do not. Instead, it waits until all of the images have been retrieved and then it draws the page once. Until all of the images are downloaded, you are basically looking at a blank screen. This can be solved by placing image dimensions in all the IMG tags. If this information is included, the browser knows where to lay everything out in relation to each other even before it has received the images. In older versions of Netscape, the page will be displayed right away (with blank spaces for the missing images). The user experience with IE and newer Netscape will also be improved, because the content of the page will not move around as additional images arrive. None of the IMG tags in these pages include image dimensions (HEIGHT and WIDTH attributes). I would suggest that the next thing to try is to add that in for all of the images and see if the page seems to improve.