IE6 gets loaded by default on installing XP and so it does remain on the pc of many people who do not bother to upgrade it since they anyway hardly use it, with Firefox becoming their default browser. I do get reminded of its existence once a while when I accidentally open it! Regards, RightMan
Main focus should be on designing for new browsers, but remember that it is still default on fresh XP installs, so there are still people who may use it... regardless, it is becoming old hat, and it should remain a rather low priority.
I think this honestly depends on your target market. If you're aiming for teens or younger adults, most of them know about better browsers than IE6, or at least know how to use Windows Updates and are using IE7 / IE8. However if you are targeting the older crowd, you may want to try and keep design specs working properly for IE6.
Take a look at your website stats. I just looked at mine and 9% of my visitors still use IE6.0. I had one person last month using IE3.0!!
IE 3? maybe he's a guy from the past landed on the future or maybe he spoofed the browser Agent, by using curl to scrap your site
Unfortunately I still have many visitors in my site that uses that old piece of crap...geez, it always screw up the layout of my Joomla site! >_<
I guess as long as Microsoft still in action, IE won't die although most of webmasters nowadays switched to Firefox.
You only need to cater to IE6 if your site caters to professional and corporate audiences. A very high percentage are currently very reluctant to move to a new browser (for various security and workflow reasons combined) so if your visitors are going to be there, you really need to take those steps to support their legacy browsers because pages rendering wrong can look really bad to someone who doesn't understand the reason it is happening. That said, you can test any other given market by donating one day of traffic to firefox, for example, and saying "you need firefox to view this site - your safety is our main concern" - things like that. Alternatively you can serve a pop up notification with the same sort of pitch or set aside a small brick of advertising space for the browser you'd like most to support. As long as your users aren't mainly IE6 users who are "obviously corporate" due to the content you serve on your sites, it's worth a try and can only mean moving forward, and good for your development and everyone else's.
You still have to take IE6 into account ... many corporate environments use nothing but, with no alternatives available.