IE had a setting that forced tables to render progressively. They documented it on the Microsoft web dev site and also I’m reasonably sure in their “cool things you can do in IE5.5” book.
Didn't know that! Wonder what made them choose to turn this off by default. Must be an interesting eng story.
I used it and it almost progressively updated too often - like cell by cell, so it wasn’t very pretty. So you kind of had to know when to use it and when not to.