Just like anything else, web design goes through its own fads. One of the current trends, or rather, a popular question to ask is "Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser?". This question has particularly been made popular by this website created by Dan Cederholm. There's no such thing as a stupid question, but the answer should be somewhat obvious: Nope.
I understand why this question has been so popular lately with a lot of designers pushing to use CSS3 attributes such as: border-radius, box-shadow, text-shadow, and the list goes on. Having said that, this isn't the first time this question has been asked. Fifteen years ago when everyone was coding using the <table> element for layout and the <font> element for styling, we were still at the mercy of browser wars. Some of the names and faces were different, but the battles were the same. Table attributes rendered differently, if they were even recognized, across IE and Netscape, and specifying font sizes via the <font> element always varied as well across the browsers.
Unless you're using Flash, I'd say it's next to impossible to have design consistency across different browsers, and that's totally fine. It's been like that since the birth of the browser wars.