That was a funny period of time because you could very transparently see the clear application of a corporate team that was tasked with improving the “startup speed KPI”.

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.

Google did a great job communicating Chrome's improvements over speed (both with startup and prefetch) and reliability (isolated and sandboxed tabs) during its launch. When you saw it, you knew that it was basically game over for any browser that had chosen to stagnate until then. They destroyed the competition.