About two years ago when trying to make a zoomable interface work in IE some colleagues and I discovered it has a wonderful set of transforms you can apply to any element, with a much easier syntax than CSS. I think they were based on / part of VRML? We were amazed that it was so easy to do any arbitrary 3D rotation, stretch or skew, and even more amazed when we read up and found it had been there since about 1996.

And then we found this functionality had been removed in IE8 :(