Yes, they've been around forever, but browsers have never properly supported column breaks and orphan control. This tends to make any content with CSS columns unsightly, which is why no one uses them.
One browser did have amazing column break/orphan control: the IE11/Spartan (Edge Classic) renderer. It's amazing/sad how much the web regressed in CSS multi-column support rather than improved since then.
(Some group or groups at Microsoft during Windows 8 development must have passionately loved multi-column text and proper "newspaper inspired" typography and wanted to see it succeed, and they did not seem to survive the backlash against Windows 8, sadly.)
