Ever had the experience that you've made a great website, but your customer tells you it looks crappy? Then you ask which browser he is using and it turns out he's using Internet Explorer 6. Internet Explorer 6 has frustrated a lot of web designers. It doesn't follow the standard html and css in many ways, so you'll need some hacks to make your website look like it's supposed to. Now we're at the point where a lot of designers are wondering if they should still support it. Is it still worth all the effort? Internet Eplorer 7 is there for more then a year, so people should upgrade, right? If you don't use the IE6 hacks any more, people will see crappy sites, so won't that push them to upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 faster? A lot of designers think this makes sense and have stopped supporting Internet Explorer 6.

Web designers live often in a techie environment and this makes some of them think that everybody is a techie. They think it's more important that their sites look great in Opera and don't care about Internet Explorer 6. They think people who are still using Internet Explorer 6 are idiots. I think they are totally wrong. If you ask people which browser they are using and which version, most of them won't be able to tell you. In fact they don't even care. If they see a site that looks bad in their browser, they won't think 'it's time to upgrade my browser'. They will think the site is bad and use their back button. Just have a look at the statistics from W3schools: in february 2008, over 30% of the people are still using Internet Explorer 6. So do you really want to stop supporting 30% of the internet population? Of course you don't. The number is going down, but it's going down slowly.

In conclusion, my answer to the question is very clear: yes you still have to support Internet Explorer 6 and probably still for quit some time.