[warfangle]

Because rendering a table is almost always slower. Granted, this is an old benchmark (don't have time to pull up any that are more recent), but: http://www.howtocreate.co.uk/browserSpeed.html

[blakeperdue]

Sometimes a small rendering performance hit is worth avoiding the development headache of getting multi-column divs to display properly across browsers.

Tables can still be useful when holding short content that has lots of columns.

[deno]

In the world without Internet Explorer all you need is CSS3 column-count: N; property.

Still, using tables for any kind of formatting looks just plain bad. If you're lazy there are CSS frameworks.