You already got some good replies. Pay special attention to the "less is
more" vibe. And by that, I'm not just talking about bytes. Just because
you CAN make your website blink and jiggle, that doesn't mean you SHOULD.

As far as browser stability issues go, I ran into a problem recently where
Sun's Java plug-in was causing IE to crash. Unfortunately, it also wasn't
properly detecting and downloading the latest update. I had to uninstall
the plug-in and download the latest version manually. Thankfully, after all
that the crashing problem did go away with the latest version.

It's well and good if you want to switch browsers for your personal use --
nothing wrong with Firefox, as far as I know. But that's a red herring
here. Other people WILL be using IE, and not all instability/crashing
problems are IE's fault anyway (i.e. you could just as easily have them in
other browsers). By minimizing the "wiggle factor" of your web site, you'll
tend to stick to the more heavily tested areas of all browser code, and
likewise will tend to avoid the parts that cause crashes.

Finally, this was mentioned in another reply, but I just want to
reemphasize: download speed is affected by more than just the number of
bytes of your web page. Depending on how you're hosting it, you could be
sharing server CPU time and bandwidth with other Internet users, at the
server site or elsewhere. One would hope that for a person using dial-up,
the modem would be the limiting factor, but it's not always. It's well and
good to test your web site yourself, but be careful when trying to
extrapolate your own results to other people's experience.

As far as online booking goes: when we travel, we use the Internet almost
exclusively for research. But we book by phone. Call us old-fashioned.
That said, I'm not convinced using the phone is any more reliable; we've had
plenty of hotel screw-ups, from losing our reservation altogether to minor
snafus related to type and location of the room, even booking by phone. As
far as getting the best price goes, we're not huge fans of haggling; if
we're looking for the lowest price, the hotel who quotes the lowest price
unprompted gets the booking. So maybe we ought to consider booking
online...how much worse could it be?

Pete