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... 😅