Are they? I feel like the real difference is an insistence on actually enforcing them. There were some really strong standards at the time of IE5, it was just the wild west in terms of what got built. And then you had Tantek Çelik quietly building all of them in IE5 on the Mac. Just a question of where to look.

May just be me being a romantic. Work shut off access to non-Chrome browsers an took away Incognito Mode. Which is fun for QA work.