Agree 100% with you. All we have to do is look at the Opera browser with their Presto rendering engine to realise the truth of this - it really rattled Internet Explorer and Microsoft with its super fast rendering speed and small size that made it easy to download on slow connections. It made Internet Explorer and Firefox look like clunky and slow bloats of software. Opera was so good that they were able to charge for it, and despite the free browsers available many people bought it.
As far as I remember, Opera with its own rendering engine used to be one of the most web standards compliant browsers.
That said, my point stands - I was pointing out how browsers like Firefox and Chrome are still bloated softwares compared to early Opera (pre Blink, Presto versions). Them "dropping out of the race" is irrelevant to that aspect.
It's actually the opposite, Opera (Presto) was stricter in its adherence to standards. It was the first/second (depending on OS) to pass the acid 2 tests, and constantly was among the top scorers.
That said, there were often compatibility problems on various websites, because they favored IE (which wasn't standards compliant), and rarely if ever tested on Opera.
