How fast the page becomes visible depends on your connection speed. At work I can use a 2MBit line, and the pages are coming fast. A big difference at home where I use a 56k connection (V90). I see the cookie warning, click on "No", see the ad, and go to the kitchen to get something to drink.

If the programmer of the script would add two things it will speed up the process at least for the people using IE5. First, use the CSS table-layout:fixed; for tables. With this style sheet IE5 doesn't need to render a whole table before displaying it. Second, add the attribute DEFER to the <SCRIPT> tag if the scripts doesn't need to be executed during loading the page. IE5 will first display the page and then start interpreting the scripts.

Martin