Your present user figures speak for themselves. You certainly need to keep supporting IE6 until it's in negligable use.

The best way to solve the problem is to---from the beginning---only use techniques that are known to work everywhere, where 'everywhere' currently, unfortunately, includes IE6.

Since you've just done a bit of a redesign and it looks good from where I'm sitting ( Opera ); if I were you I wouldn't invest too much time making everything look perfect in IE6. Just get the functional part working ( you said the site is 'practically unusable' in places, so sort that bit out ), but leave any tiny visual discrepancies alone, or assign them a very low priority, and then just watch the user browser figures. Maybe in 6 months things will be different. Maybe in 6 months all those IE6 sufferers will find Opera ^_-

You know, Opera users may well appear as IE6 users. Personally, I always indentify as IE because certain sites refuse to open up to browsers that identify as Opera, so.. maybe your user stats are a little skewed by Opera users ( for which the site works fine ). Last time I looked at the browser ID string in this mode ( was Opera 8, sometime last year ) it was equiv. to the IE6 browser ID string.

ie7 is a high priority update in microsoft update. This is probably why the numbers are going down. I am not sure but I think aol still uses ie6 as their primary browser. old joke:How many Microsoft programmers does it take to screw in a light bulb? None. Let's define darkness as the new industry standard.

As a general rule, you typically design for Firefox, since it is the most standards compliant browser out there, and then fix for IE6, IE7, and Safari as needed. FF has a ton of awesome developer tools (Firebug, etc) to get the job done, so that's another reason to start with it.

Your numbers certainly indicate that IE6 is an issue, and I imagine it will be for at least another year. Imagine if you lost 30% of your revenue? I tend to make it at least usable in IE6, and if it's a little rough around the edges, maybe it will remind them to upgrade.

I agree - this is exactly how I develop. Get it right in Firefox first, then make corrections for other browsers where necessary.

For IE6 I am not afraid to used underscored classes in my stylesheet, since this is the quickest and simplest way to make corrections for it. Purists insist on importing stylesheets, however IMO this is unnecessary overkill with no gain whatsoever other than more development time.

My only qualms with Firefox are its massive memory leaks.


Matti Ressler
Suomedia

Unfortunatly people still use IE6 even though with IE8 and Firefox 3.0 coming out it will take a little longer to make sure the Website is perfect in all browsers but until IE6 is down to like 10 percent I would keep supporting it

Hey Dani, I don't know if you saw the statistics by the w3 of how many people use what browser so I will post them as of april 2008 IE7 24.9 percent IE6 28.9 percent IE5 1.0 FX (firefox) 39.1 percent Moz (netscape) 1.0 percent Safari 2.2 percent Opera 1.4 percent
here is my source http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

I'm with yahoo on this one:

yahoo link

A good coder shall support IE6 and FX2 and never bother with any other; should I add: browsing toys, which are more seriously concerned with their own look rather than with how they render your reqiured content.

Regards