Cross Browser Consistency

http://dowebsitesneedtolookexactlythesameineverybrowser.com/

For those that don't want to parse this url.. Do websites need to look exactly the same in ever browser?

When I first saw this url I thought to myself, "Self, the simple answer is 'Yes'." I mean who wants to go to their banks website and see a different layout when they get on with Firefox and another when they are checking their account on the road from some hotel's computer. No one! You lose all confidence in the site authors if it looks different every time you visit.

Also being a web developer I feel the pains of cross browser support all the time so I wanted to go on and commiserate with the other developers. You know why do we have to have a specific stylesheet for IE7 that is full of hacks to make it work like the standards ask, and why does IE6 even exist still and so on.

When I hit the site all I was greated with was a fancy looking 'No!'. I chuckled a bit to myself and said, "yeah right". Then, being the nerd that I am, I immediately opened up every browser I have to see what the differences were for this site. Of course lucky me launching parallels brought the gray screen of death down upon my poor tired little MacBook. But after I recovered from that I took a look at all the browsers.

Turns out the 'No!' that looked so fancy in OSX's Firefox, even fancier looking on OSX's Safari, pretty plain on XP in Firefox, Chrome and IE7, and slightly PC's Safari was a little fancier (Check it out for yourself). So when this site poses the question exactly the same I guess I have to agree. No, there is no reason to go through the effort of making sure your fonts are rendered the same way on every browser by rendering them with vectors or making sure you restyle all buttons with your own custom styles.

As long as the layout is the same and I can click a button in the same place on each browser labeled the same way and no text is falling out of divs or something like that I am pretty satisfied. I realize I'm a developer and am probably pretty utilitarian that way, but then again how many users of the web are really using more than one browser anyway.

All this said, I gotta mention.. I like the 'No!' on OSX's Safari the best. ;)