Well, it depends on the contract.
You should care to describe any extra work such as IE6 support, clientside optimizations, application deployment and how much it will cost before starting a project.
Your customer will decide if he really needs it. If he decides not to pay for it, that’s great! No IE6 pain, less bugs, more fun.
If he needs IE6… well, it’s paid and you have to implement it as good as possible.
+5—10% to shop revenue are not enough?
Well, you’ve got me in the corner! :}
You are right, totally right. I shouldn’t complain, I didn’t take that into account.
in my country, there is stll a lot of people using IE6, especially in goverment office.
they don’t care about the update, they just want to ‘SHOW IT’.
thats why, i make IE6 as my standard browser for development testing (althought i dont want it - to slowww…)
but its just for view.
in my experience, if it’s work fine in IE6, it will work fine to with another browser like firefox
its good to see in google analytic like samdark suggest
No, it is not slow! Or… slowness of IE is one of last problems. It buggy like a hell, putting computer using IE 6 in to much risk. And is completely standard-less or to be more precisely, it reuses so called microsoft standards which has noting to do with world standards.
Yeah! And the number of additional code you have to write to make it work in IE 6 is gigantic! I saw some page (not sure if it wasn’t cssgarden.com) where someone showed out that he wrote more code for making it’s website IE6-compatible than he need to write to build whole page for other browsers.
It isn’t the problem that you have to write like ten or even twenty percent more code to have page look exactly the same in IE 6 as in other modern browsers. It is the problem that you usually have to write twice as much code, do some tricks that would force normal developer thinking you’re out of your mind, and even so you will never get 100% the same look in IE 6 like in modern browsers.
No, they won’t! :[ You don’t know, how Microsoft works? Open Source does not exists (deny everything!), no one can do anything better than M$, etc. Sad, but true!
Blah.
Sounds exactly like the guys at Google or the dudes at Apple…
The truth is that the newest IE is much, much better. Still not perfect, of course - but blaming the Microsoft developers of today for IE6 is just not fair. 
Yep, Alex Mogilevsky and the whole IE team did a great job with IE8 and IE9. These aren’t perfect but at least W3C recommendations are respected.
Was talking out of frustration… I have just done one site with one beautiful table and a couple of columns… amazing. 
Now, seriously… don’t you think it would be better what I said? get something that already exists, it works and it is open source in order to provide a modified version that is fully compatible with today’s programming standards?
Why not just one engine? what is the need of browser independent functions? I dont really understand if that is not just a: I want to get a big piece of the market scenario.
A single product eliminates competition and it’s bad for the whole browser market. IE6 in its time was a really great browser with a lot of nice features. And since W3C got practical and describing already implemented features in HTML5/CSS3, many of IE6 features are in HTML5/CSS3 now: font face, drag and drop, short meta for encoding etc.
I dont think that by having one engine (which they could develop to make it faster and better than others, maintaining same standards but not inventing new ways of doing the same thing -if it wasnt for nowadays multibrowser javascript libraries) can be bad for competition. They could always create different ways to see their UI or user/programmer features, extensions, mash-up combinations, and so on…
Anyway… it is just my opinion…
Because It was supposed to sound like this. Just my own little bit of sarcasm.
Well… I don’t know. A few people been telling me that IE 9 is written from scratch at has best HTML 5 / CSS 3 support among all browsers currently on the market. True? Maybe. But IE 7 and IE 8 were also supposed to be written from scratch. And even if the did bring a lot of fixes or changes corresponding to previous version, they also brought another pile of sh*t with them. Pity, but true.
Sounds for me like I’ve been listening to the same story when IE 7 and then IE 8 was released. It also was supposed to not be perfect but at least world standard should be matched. And then, after some time it auto-magically turned out that, again it is not perfect nor standards are respected. Again, heard that IE 9 matches W3C specifications on HTML 5 / CSS 3 best currently in the market. But, somehow I fear that this wonderfully sounding story will revert for third time to the very same as we already heard twice.
Yep, can be so. I just hope this time it will be better.
Though I agree with samdark on this, please note Antonio, that even if such situation would exist, Microsoft guys would even so develop own browser. Simply like that, because this is the way Redmond thinks. If it would be only one, common webbrowsing engine - it would have to be open-source. And since for Microsoft an open source is… not existing / bad as bad it can be… you got the answer.
And, beside. Look at any famous project (like VNC for example) on sourceforge.net or any other open source project repository. All projects goes always the same way. There always is or soon or later there will be someone thinking that the same can be done slightly different and creates a fork.
My conclusion is that having one, universal webbrowser engine isn’t bad. It is simple impossible. And even, if it would be possible, Microsoft would even so build it’s own browser. Tada! :]
hi Tredjer, you are right,
what ‘standards’ i mean is something like this case:
i have done build some web apps, and its time to show it to my client(IT manager)
but WHAT? my client use IE6 in his PC!,
so there is a lots error, some miss layout, ajax not working, etc.
i ask him 'why dont you use firefox or upgrade to IE8 or IE9?
what he said "c’mon there is 1000 employers in this company and most of them using IE6(from windows xp bundle),
i think(in IT GM perception), its not easy task to ask them to upgrade they browser, they all ‘busy’ people"
so they dont care about it, and i am not have enough bargain power to push my client,
and i just said, “ok ok, we will fix it” 
is IE6 still use in U.S or in your country?
Well… If I’m not mistaken, Windows XP Service Pack 3 (even SP2 too) forced user to upgrade to IE 7. Even more - constant upgrades via Windows Update would eventually install you IE 8. I’m pretty sure about that, as my mum is still using XP, with SP3 instalelled and Windows Update turned on and has IE 8 like since about a year or so.
Therefore, conclusion is - sorry for strong words - that your fellows in a company are rather stupid than busy. As they had intentionally turned off Windows Updates, because if the wouldn’t do this they would already had IE 8 on board. And using Windows (any version) without constantly patching it with newest updates Is for my much, much more risky (stupid?) that staying in IE 6! :] :] :]
Oh, I am pretty sure that there are many people like your IT manager in any country! :] Blah… what are asking about? I know people that are still using Windows 95! :]
I would rather support Antonio’s question if IE should be used or if webpages should force user to upgrade to a newer version, that asking if IE 6 is being used, because it is and it will be for a long time.
There was a very famous, internationally recognizable Polish SF author (Stanislaw Lem), who had said once: Before I got connected to the Internet I had no idea that there are so many idiots around the world. I think this is a good conclusion to all people still using IE 6! :] (Sorry, samdark, as you seems to be liking this kind of people! :])
And what with all the "glamour" sites like "about.me" "facebook" "twitter"and like… do you think they work on IE6 ?
I don’t know like those you mentioned (I don’t use social networking at all), but I saw a few rather big sites in my home Poland that when connected with IE 6 were saying something like “sorry, we buried down IE 6, please upgrade”.
And yes - I just found (myself! :]) a great argument! If Microsoft itself is forcing using IE 8 (you have to manually, intentionally turn off Windows Updates or remove IE update from a list of updates) then we are talking about not reasonable users. My site should not support not reasonable users as they are general threat to whole world! :] :] :]
As someone in this thread mentioned. We would have a complete different discussion if creator of IE 6 would still support it. But they put "R.I.P" label on it years ago…
All points are right here…
but the problem is that old OS like windows 98 the latest IE you can install is in fact IE6… you cannot upgrade… and many users have old computers that does not support new anything new then win98… so they are stick with IE6