They sure did! That was the main reason why I swapped to Opera from Firefox forever ago. I believe they also were the first to make the landing page where you could click regular sites that you wanted to go to as well as saving your browser session when it's closed or crashes, restoring it when you next launch.

They had one more thing that was the bomb back when 56kbit was enviable, and that was that when you turned off the image loading (some browsers still support "offline" mode, this was a subset of that) it would still display any images that it had in its cache - so you could read your news with the common page elements rendered but not spend time downloading huge article images.

I'll shut up now before I reveal my age... 😅

That wasn't really part of the problem. The most used browser engines are often some of the most irritating and frustrating to deal with, just look at Internet Explorer for most of its existence. Safari is an obnoxiously widely used browser because Apple enforces its use on iPhone no matter the browser you use and it has a bizarre update schedule tied to OS version. This causes many iPhones to have ancient versions of Safari.

The problem here is not that there are or were too many browser engines, it is big companies making their browser engines in anticompetitive ways.

We're "lucky" that Blink, the engine that runs all Chromium-based browsers, is currently keeping up with browser standards. For now. Who knows if Google will keep it that way or decide to change course and move away from FOSS standards.

It is dangerous to put so much stock and power into a single huge corporation like this. A large variety of innovative and competing browser engines is far healthier than one dominant engine.

So it is like browsers out of the USA then with their secret (company is not allowed to tell anyone about it) data draining laws?