I did some debugging and found this: the "kernel-default" package has about 5000 change entries resulting in 2.3MB large HTML table displayed. Although YaST can generate that huge table rather quickly (~1 second in my testing system), for Qt it takes ~13 seconds to parse and display the HTML. After limiting the number of the displayed changes to max. 512 the parsing and displaying takes ~1 second (i.e. more than 10x speed up). The HTML size is then ~0.2MB. 512 should be enough for the most packages, even the most changed YaST packages have less changes (~400), still back to 2009.