Even with the newer 33.6 modems, the speed of the Net itself still keeps us moving at a 'crawl', considering a 100K file, when it comes to sound, pictures, and animations, is puny. If your cable company is supporting Cable Modems, I would look into it.
Compression is the method that everyone uses to deal with the speed constraint.
If your browser is capable of doing this, hopefully, it will ask you where you would like to put the extracted files. Hopefully it will not be necessary to learn about Helpers and your browser will simply ask you where you want to Save the file. Unfortunately, with many browsers you must teach which Helper App. to use with which type of file . Usually, there is a Configuration , Options , or Preferences area within your browser that lets you teach it this important information. Mac files on my pages are encoded in a Net-standard format named BinHex.