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If you stick to the basics of CSS that have been around for a decade or so, both of them are basically solved problems. Browsers are remarkably uniform in how they handle the stuff that was a PITA in 2008.

The problem is that expectations adjust too, and now we want all these new HTML5 features that were just pioneered in a single browser a couple years ago. Those have a lot of cross-browser issues.

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In many environments, expectations don't have to adjust. With corporate clients, expectations were never reasonable in the first place, and many common requirements that have been around for decades still aren't reasonable.

Clients often demand idiocy like "pixel perfection," specific fonts, custom scaling behavior for size (including application-controlled zooming), and other things that simply aren't part of the paradigm for accessing websites through web browsers.

Between that and the fact that going "beyond the basics of CSS" is a pretty common thing, browser interfailure is still a real problem. It's not as bad as it used to be, but the problem is still there, and many of us are still dealing with it regularly.

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