The original Mozilla browser that came out of Netscape.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozilla_Application_Suite

It had a reputation for being slow and bloated at the time which prompted the creation of a slimmed down browser, Phoenix which eventually became Firefox

Oh wow, I’m not even sure if I ever used that. I do remember Phoenix, but this barely rings a bell.

And towards your question: Different times. Both hardware and browser capabilities were vastly different back then, so some technological choices made in the early days might have made more sense.

For me personally, I know that back in the day I was a lot more forgiving of delays than I am now.