All Web designers know Internet Explorer 6. At one point, you were probably friends. But IE6 is like that friend you had in high school… You both had a lot of fun before graduation, then you both went to college. You worked hard, graduated, got a job, got married, had kids, and so on. Meanwhile, this friend partied all through college, eventually dropped out, now works at the local burger shack, lives with their parents, and hasn't had a date since you last saw each other. And they call you all the freakin' time, wanting you to come hang out with them, because for some reason roughly 22% of your friends still think this guy is cool.
Yeah, we all know that relationship. If you haven't done anything with CSS-driven layouts in the last seven years or so, find out what I'm talking about, but for those of you who actually care about doing things right, you know the pain. When I started designing this site, I made a conscious decision to not support IE6. I've done this on two other sites that I've built in the past year, and it is such a liberating feeling. Not only is it one less browser to test in (coincidentally, it's also the one that has 99% of the issues), but you don't have to worry about figuring out the best way to run IE6 and 7 side-by-side. The hardest part is knowing when to make that decision of neglect.
For me, it's really about my gut instinct. I do a very quick evaluation of the site's target audience, complexity of the design, and if things like usability will take a major hit. In the case of this site, we're looking at a target audience of Web designers/developers, which gives me enough information to make a decision. If the design is pretty complex, there is less of a chance that I will be supporting IE6, just from the massive amount of debugging time. Usability is a toss-up, but I think that if the site is going to be a pain to use, you may want to offer some support.
If you're redesigning an existing site, you probably have some type of analytics package where you can see the actual percentage of IE6 users you have. I'm willing to say that for most sites, if your IE6 user base is less than 20%, you should drop support. Obviously, this won't work in all scenarios, especially if you have an e-commerce site that directly affects your revenue stream.
With that being said, I do like to provide some type of warning or notification to IE6 users that their experience will not be the same as those with a, well, good browser. Sometimes a simple alert message will do the trick, but you can also get fancy with modals and IE-only messages via conditional comments, like I did with this site.
I encourage everyone to set a New Year's resolution for 2009 to drop IE6 support on at least one Web site that you create. Just be careful, because once you've felt the freedom, it's even harder to make yourself pay a visit to your old friend without getting sick.
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