As mentioned on the 37signals blog, Apple’s just-announced .Mac successor MobileMe won’t support Internet Explorer 6. Rock on, Apple.
Now that IE7 has finally slogged past IE6 in overall browser market share, it’s time for more websites to deprecate IE6. I don’t believe in denying access to a website based on browser version, but I do believe that it’s acceptable to serve a degraded, possibly even slightly broken experience to a crappy eight-year-old browser.
Take all that time you would have spent implementing IE6 workarounds and instead spend it making your site just a little bit more awesome for modern browsers. Better yet, spend that time making the site more accessible to screen readers and ensuring that your design scales well at higher zoom levels for vision impaired users.
If IE6 users complain, tell them how to upgrade to IE7 or Firefox. If they prefer not to upgrade, recommend that they use a competitor’s website instead. While your competitors are wasting time trying to make their products work in an ancient browser, you’ll be working on things that actually matter.