Should I Support IE6 by Default?

I’m certain this will draw a lot of criticism, but hey its Friday.

I’m seriously debating whether I should continue supporting Internet Explorer 6 for my clients by default. Instead offering IE6 support as an optional service for an additional cost.

Given that IE7 is a mandatory upgrade for all Windows users and with the numbers of IE6 are rapidly dwindling, is it something that should still be supported by default?

I know there are still plenty of IE6 users out there and some clients will certainly need IE6 to be supported, which I’m fine doing. But should it come at an extra cost? It certainly takes extra time, so at the moment I need to add “IE6 Time” to each of my estimates. Why not remove the padding and tell the client where their money is going and have them make the choice?

For the launch of Fling Media, I chose to launch without fixing for IE6, which has drawn a murmur of controversy, but not thankfully much. Frankly I saw it as a non-issue. I had to pick and choose my battles to get everything ready for launch, making a choice to either hold off launching because of IE6 or fix at some point in the future. My traffic from IE6 users historically has been pretty low even when it was adjusted for IE6, so I focused on my target, not the minority.

In the mobile space, you have to make tough calls of which browsers you are going to support all the time. The level of support for web standards is so fragmented that is makes it virtually impossible to support them all. The desktop browser space isn’t nearly as bad, but I’m accustomed to making a choice of what is cost effective to support and what isn’t.

So at what point do we draw the line in the sand? Don’t we need to make hard calls in order to push the medium forward? To be able to innovate and create using the most adopted standards? Or do we wait? And if so, how long?

The initial Web Standards movement couldn’t have succeed unless we claimed Netscape 4 was the first victim. The number of users at the time for Netscape 4 was far lower than IE6 is today. But Netscape 4 wasn’t effectively recalled by its maker, as Microsoft has done by requiring an upgrade to IE7.

Anyway, something I’m pondering but haven’t come up with a firm decision yet. What do you think?