Possible Duplicates:
IE6: To support or not to support.
Do you plan to support IE 6 on your future projects?
I've finished the design and about to code HTML for a website that will use fancy form elements and effects.
I'm wondering if I should support IE6? What are the latest stats? Do you support IE6 still?
It all depends on your audience context. If you are some traditional business or a big site with a high IE user proportion, by all means, use the hacks to get IE working, or risk losing customers.
However, if the IE population isn't as important to you, or there is just a general lack of IE users on your website (think web development blogs where most of the visitors are smart and don't use IE) then you can ignore IE.
I ignore Internet Explorer on my website as it's a web dev blog and the IE proportion is minuscule in the session logs.
According to W3Counter, IE6 is used by more people than Opera, Safari, and any version of Chrome. It trails IE8 (#1), Firefox 3.6, and IE7. I would still care for a bit longer (especially if you are dealing with the general population).
However, Google is apparently ready to phase out support, so perhaps the world's IE6 problems will go away sooner rather than later, as consumers follow Google's prompt to upgrade.
Last I checked, it was something like 8% (Sorry, not 2% as I originally stated!) or so. Personally I think you should support at least IE6. It's not too difficult and will make you a more disciplined developer. At least that's how I see it. :)
EDIT: And I still stand by my answer. IE6 is a pain, but not impossible. And for 8%, worth it.
A good website should degrade gracefully. Make it work in IE6, but don't try to make the layout perfect.
Consider not just IE6, but somebody using Opera Mini, or another less capable mobile browser, or Lynx/Links, or a blind user with a screenreader. All of those combined add up to a decent fraction of your audience and if you don't have time to test all of those.
So, your site should still be usable, it just might not look quite as pretty, or it might require reloading a page instead of using AJAX.
18% use it (Mostly corporates users who cant upgrade for some reason) so unless you want to cut out 1 in 5 customers you have to endure the pain.