To you hypothetical scenario yes that could be the right way to deal with the issue. It is possible that doing good a/b testing and appealing to the 88% that is on other browsers would bring in more money than spending that money on the support of IE6 users. I personally am just getting very tired of all of the righteous arguments from web designers/developers that just don’t support it at all and refuse to do so. I believe it’s out job to give our clients the best advice possible and if their budget allows for extra time spent on IE6 we should do it. We should even recommend that IE6 should be supported for those clients that it makes sense to do so.

Let’s say you just finished building a $30,000 website for a client, and it currently doesn’t support IE6. Let’s say you figure it’ll take a full week of time, or $6,000 to properly support IE6. In doing so, they’ll appeal to that 12% of their traffic, and make a bit more money.

Is that the right approach for the client, or does it make more sense to invest that $6,000 in enhancing the current website for non-IE6 users, and possibly doing some A/B testing on their sales page? That way, they are investing that money towards the 88% of their traffic that is non IE6, instead of for only the 12%, which potentially could earn even more money for them.

If a client is making tons of money off their website, then there’s definitely value for them to support IE6. But if they are already pushing their budget on a new site, and the site doesn’t have an eCommerce component, it’s hard to convince them to drop another wad of cash on full IE6 support, especially considering traffic is slowly disappearing for it (obviously it’s still far from zero, but last year most of my sites had about 25% IE 6, and now it’s around 10%). For most small sites, IE6 support isn’t too difficult to achieve. But on larger sites with lots of Javascript, Flash and other moving parts, it can be a real challenge to get it to work, and sometimes you have to write separate code-paths for different browsers, which makes maintenance more difficult. In those scenarios I don’t blame companies that charge extra, since it’s a substantial amount of work. But ultimately I think the IE6 decision should be the clients, and not forced by a web designer or developer.