One of my pet hates is browser rendering, and the fact that different browsers all display differently.

We spend an awful lot of time and effort trying to get content to render the same on Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, Chrome etc and the list seems to be growing. Most of the phone calls from clients are about how their site renders in IE5.5 on a 200 year old PC! This applies to large corporates as well, most of the big organisations we work with are still using Internet Explorer 6.0, which was released in 2001!

Pixel perfect design is simply not achievable any more and spending a larger percentage of the development budget trying to achieve it seems like wasted money to me.

So I have decided to adopt a policy of graded browser support, the essence of this is:

Browser support should focus on usability and accessibility rather than pixel perfect design. Sites should render in all browsers, but provide advanced features and aesthetics to those which can support it.

Basically your focus should be on does the site work (functionality) as opposed to pixel perfect design.

This is not a new concept, some organisations such as the BBC and Yahoo have been using this approach for some time. Even the UK government has changed their guidance on this matter (paragraph 39):

You should check that the content, functionality and display all work as intended. There may be minor differences in the way that the website is displayed. The intent is not that it should be pixel perfect across browsers, but that a user of a particular browser does not notice anything appears wrong.

Links of interest:

BBC browser support
Yahoo
UK Government guidance on browser testing