Comment by KPGv2

I'm not sure there was a technical way to preload back then.

I wasn't working in web dev in the early 00s, but I had done some informally. I just don't think preloading was a thing.

It's been a long time, but I'm pretty sure AJAX does not predate this website, SPAs were impossible, etc. I suppose you might do something with IFRAMEs, but you likely wouldn't be able to fetch those /after/ the main page. Preloading would be simul-loading and lag the hell out of your main window.

The way to instruct a browser to load back then was to wait for the user to actually click to fetch, and that would navigate away from the current page.