Too many websites use gimmicky browser tricks, and it often backfires. Too much layered style-sheets, Adobe-Flash, Active-X, and JavaScript can make the site sluggish, buggy, and crashy. I don't know whether its resume padding or management-by-airline-magazine, but the results stink. MSNBC.com is a pretty good example. It often acts strange, such as transparencies overlapping, getting stuck without the indicator showing any activity and then suddenly finishing, and other oddities are common. (It works better in IE than Mozilla, which is what we'd expect of MS, but still acts a bit odd in IE at times.)

If you absolutely have to use Adobe-Flash or layered style sheets to do something that plain-jane HTML cannot, that is understandable. However, much of it seems unnecessary.
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Note that some websites used odd style-sheet layering to force the ads to render before the article. I suppose in those cases, they did indeed weigh the tradeoffs, and decided that iffy rendering was better for them than loss of ad revenue. To the user, it is annoying as hell, though. The business risks losing traffic to less annoying sites. Sometimes bean-counters order that something be done without understanding the consequences.
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Pondering merging to BrowserAbuseSyndrome, but that is about using browsers when a browser is not appropriate. Instead, this is about using the wrong browser features when the right ones exist in the browser.
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CategoryWebDesign