When to dump IE6

[Hell Puppy]

Our mainstream friends are starting to dump IE6 support. Facebook has punted it. Digg has announced they're not going to design around it, but thus far haven't punted the browser. Youtube has announced they're going to drop support for IE6 but haven't named a date to my knowledge.

Why would you want to quit coding for it?

I would argue IE6 stifles innovation. There's a lot of really cool things you can do from a design standpoint in IE8, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, etc that IE6 doesn't support. Remember it came out in 2001. That's practically stone age in internet time. Not to mention the general design hassles, code in CSS2 and you no longer spend hours tuning a complex page just so it is legible to people running old ass browsers.

Who still uses it?

XP users who run "out of the box" (this is the same group of users who want you to fix their computer when you visit them because they're loaded with viruses, etc, from running IE6). That group includes most peoples grandparents and GonZo. Corporate users also tend to be way behind the bleeding edge as massive enterprise level upgrades to tens of thousands of corproate desktops are expensive. They also likely run applications that are just as dated as the browser which may or may not work with the newer browsers.

Most of the stats I've seen shows IE6 market share around 25% and falling like a rock. Are these 25% porn buyers?

This is kind of like changing your designs from widths of 800 pixels to 1024. Very similar decisions to be made.

My own thought is I plan to quit testing against IE6 by the end of the year. My gut says alot of people use XP because they fear Vista, but they are itching for something newer that works and Windows 7 is going to sell like gangbusters and drop that IE6 market share below 10% after Christmas.