If you are on a LAN or WAN, it may be a result of too many people on your network trying to get out onto the Internet at the same time. Again, if you have a standard 64kb link from your network to your service provider, it does not take much demand to slow down the connection. And, of course, you can blame Telkom, which still relies on those ancient copper wires and electro-mechanical exchanges in large parts of their networks, resulting in uncontrollable line noise, which reduces the efficiency of digital communication. In other words, bad lines mean slower access. Telkom still guarantees their lines only up to a speed of 2.4 kb per second, less than a tenth of the capacity of most modems.
New software does indeed slow down the Internet experience.
Navigator Gold was advisable only for those who wished to use its Web page creation tool, which was one of the weakest of its kind in any case. With the new version of Navigator, you in fact have to download the entire Communicator suite, but you can choose not to install the Composer element, which is essentially a revamped Navigator Gold. There are no nice guys in the battle of the browsers, and Microsoft's real weapon is that it gives away Explorer for free. I still prefer Explorer, but it's a matter of taste and cost. I find that, while it takes longer to load Explorer than Navigator, once it is active on the screen, it brings pages down a lot faster.