Do Websites Need to Look the Same in Every Browser?

There is a misconception that in progressive enhancement, you are designing and developing an interface stymied by the requirement that it still also work on the slowest, most out‑of‑date, browser in the supported matrix.

Whilst partially true (for example the lowest common denominator will determine a lot of decisions at the architectural stage), what progressive enhancement actually does is ask that development starts with that old, outdated browser in mind. From there, with some careful development, there is no real limit. What this does, however, is produces a website or application where the user experience can be significantly different depending on the browser or device you access it from.

I like to believe that anybody still accessing the web on Internet Explorer 6 (or even 7, or 8 ‑ all of which are over a decade old) is vividly aware that the internet is a less forgiving, more broken, place for them to surf. Thus, they are likely quite used to (and maybe even quite like) a less interactive experience.

Nevertheless, a point of contention I've come across many times in development teams is where testing raises an issue of inconsistency. This particularly happened a lot during my time at John Lewis where one of the test devices in particular was an iPhone 4, and a personal device of the product owner was a first‑generation iPad Mini. Both were long overdue a trip to the recycling plant but there they were, raising bugs on our Jira board because the fly‑in navigation didn't animate smoothly, or the (custom) checkboxes looked different.

With a solid base of markup and working core functionality, it is ok that a website behaves or looks differently on different devices. This nuance is a fundamental feature of the internet. Being able to tap into all the additional features a newer browser might support in order to make that experience faster, smoother, or easier; whilst simultaneously still offering support for my gran's flicking beige CRT is an art all of its own.

So, just in case you missed it, the answer is in the standfirst: no, websites do not need to look the same in every browser. If you show me a website that looks and behaves exactly the same on a decade‑old browser as it does on the latest version of Chrome, I will confidently show you a website that is fundamentally not taking advantage of the great flexibility and features that the web has to offer.