Thanks to John Papa for making me aware of this. Via Visual Studio Magazine Sept 2012, p. 10.
Concerning my example that only seemed nice in IE10/Win8. http://elbow.d2g.com/newtop/
This helps explain
caniuse.com site is a handy reference. In this case it indicates that the other browsers needed my code to have certain prefixes in order for this to actually show multi columns properly.
So this is akin to the purpose of Modernizr, as I gather, only different.
XWire 