The lack of transparent PNG support was awful for a while. I believe IE8, maybe even IE7 supported it, but IE6 was still everywhere in the wild at the time, and your site could look strange without transparent PNG support.
I’m honestly grateful for where we are at right now with major browsers and web standards.
More like browser --- or two, if you count Firefox...
and web standards
...are being wielded as a weapon to maintain a monopoly. The fact that it's a standard means nothing more than... the fact that it's a standard. The ones in control are still those at Google, and they can change the standards however they want.
At least the stagnation of the IE6 times meant that most pages were designed specifically to a more lowest-common-denominator, which also helped greatly with accessibility and letting the even smaller minorities of browsers be useful. These days far too many sites are being turned into JS-heavy SPAs when they absolutely don't need to be, because a lot of web developers are assuming everyone has/wants(?) to use a monster-browser like Chrome.
I’m honestly grateful for where we are at right now with major browsers and web standards.