While reading  through my feeds today I noticed a post from Sitepoint regarding the use of IE 6. While most of us web designer’s wish IE a quick and painful death we always wonder if we really can stop supporting it. Many notable sites have stopped (37signals) but for the rest of us can we really stop supporting IE 6 when we build sites for our clients?

I don’t think that we can, I know that I can’t yet. The reality is that many of my user’s still use it. I could take an elitist stance and tell them to move forward with the times but I think web users are too fickle. If you head to a site and it doesn’t work they’ll just move onto another site. Your competitors are only a click away.

I have always thought that I would drop support for IE 6 when Microsoft did. They have made a practice of only supporting the 2 most recent versions of a browser. In theory that means when IE 8 comes out (in a few months) I could drop IE 6. Really though if lots of people are using it still can I stop.

As a freelance designer it can even be a selling feature. “I still support IE 6 which many of your users are using. No extra cost.” At the very least it is an interesting selling feature.

Ultimately until IE 6 drops below about 5% usage on a client’s site I will still support it.

The second bit of news comes from a fellow designers site. Niki Brown was given a free gift for her readers. If you are interested in getting some business cards printed head over to her blog and participate in the competition. I know I will.