Can I forget about IE6?

I'm a consultant working on several websites and it has been asked that I make sure my work is compatible with IE6.

Since Microsoft advised not to use it anymore and that an average of 6% of the users are using IE6: can I advise my client to forget about IE6 ?

Edit: The website is consumer oriented on the internet. I don't think IE6 is a strong requirement for my client just an old habit that's why I开发者_Go百科 ask myself if it's a good thing to advise against it.

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You are a consultant working on several websites and it has been asked that you make sure your work is compatible with IE6

If the person that pays you thinks IE6 needs to be supported, then it does!

What you think yourself, or what anyone else on stackoverflow thinks, is not important!

"a requirement is anything that an important person thinks is important"

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It depends. Who is your target audience?

• Technical or non-technical?
• Business or consumer?
• Intranet or extranet?

How much effort is involved in making the site work in IE6? As much as I hate supporting a dying browser, I would avoid using features that prevent people with older browsers from using the site. Remember - some people are forced to use older browsers (because of corporate policy, etc.).

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You're free to forget about IE6 if you can afford to ignore those users.

I'm sure that the 6% is not uniformly distributed across all audiences. If your application is targeted at an audience with a disproportionate IE6 holdout population you might have a problem.

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Ensuring that you support progressive enhancement and gracefull degredation is important even if you don't support actively the browser.

With a bit of browser detection suggest the user upgrade their browser and educate them of the benefits of the latest generation of browsers.

If you get paid to do the work then do the job properly and your clients will appreciate it.

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As the other respondents have said, it depends on your expected users. As a data point, see UK Government sticks with ie6

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Depends, I've been developing sites for IE6 for a long time, and if you write proper CSS, you can get 1:1 with every browser. Same applies to javascript, if it's well written, it will work on IE6 too.

If you're sure that the audience which will browse the product is IE6 free, I'd say you're good to go about forgetting IE6. Plus, having a check for IE6 and then displaying a warning that the site is built for IE6+, and user needs to upgrade, is a good solution too (keeping in mind the little number of IE6 users).