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Not sure I quite agree here. I know somebody who runs a financial website and IE6 visitors accounted for ~20% of their visitors but had a significantly higher conversion rate for IE6 users than others (no idea why).

#1 & 2 , Microsoft provide a free VM image of windows XP SP2 + IE6 specifically for IE6 testing. It's timebombed though so you do have to occasionally download a new one.

http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylan...

#4 Sometimes work isn't fun, if your in the business to make some money you've got to deal with that now and again.

It's your "duty" to build something that fits the clients requirements relative to the amount they pay you for it unless that involves something illegal or unethical and supporting IE6 is neither.

"Microsoft does not even support his browser anymore."

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/08/microsoft-drop...

Which documents Microsoft's commitment to support IE6 until April 2014.

"How much money do you think an IE6 user has? the browser is like a decade old. It's why we target iPhone and not Android in the mobile world. ( because iPhone users out spend android users. )"

So your solution to the IE6 problem is to ignore it and to repeat the same mistake again for developers to have to deal with again in the future?

We have the IE6 problem because that's where the money was back in it's day. It was the winner of the browser war, and thus became the interface to the substantial source of profit. Very much like your perception of the iPhone.

What you need to consider is not just what's profitable right now, but what will be profitable tomorrow, next week, next month, next year, and next decade. IE6 won the browser war; the iPhone browser is nowhere near that dominant in the mobile world.

Agreed. We did the same with our web dev firm (cut support for old browsers), and nobody seemed to notice. Anyone who "needed" support for IE6 we would have happily given them the names of a few other companies in the area that can help them.

We also were in the very good position of being able to turn down work, though, so it's easy to tell people off. I think it depends on your situation.

Idealistically though, it seems like a huge step backwards to bother supporting IE6. The more people that do, the worse the internet becomes as a whole because of it.

when i was running the site http://unity3d.com less than 1% of our visitors could not properly render an html5 doctype.

Question is, what % of users have the unity plugin installed?

I think it's quite neat that unity let's you embed your game into a web page but I often wonder how many users change their minds once posed with the requirement of a plugin install since this is exactly the kind of thing that IT savvy people advise their less technical friends not to do!