Interesting and perceptive comments, Abax.

I've just tried loading the pages again using IE 7.0.6 rather than my usual Firefox 2.0.0.5.

The browsing experience is very different indeed. I guess Firefox does some sort of progressive rendering trick on the images, as it loads the whole page in less than 30 seconds (from a cleared cache) as I posted previously.

IE7 on the other hand clearly doesn't do this trick. From a cleared cache, it took 18 minutes to download just 3 of the pictures before IE's timer expired and it gave up trying on the rest.

Best regards