I actually work on a client site and will use some text and box shadow.However i told him about the differences between browsers and that his site will not look the same in all browsers. He went home and downloaded firefox.Even if this is a very small step in the right direction (hope so) it is one.
I was impressed by your article on 24ways last year!

This doesn’t work for small businesses who are suffering financially in this shrunken world economy. My boss is adamant about not losing out on any customers, even Windows 98 and OS X 10.3.9 browsers.

Since IE6 is still a 10-15% of total customers for the business, it’s unacceptable to ignore IE6. It’s all about numbers and money in the e-commerce business and you can’t leave any customer out who provides value. IE6 still has a large grasp on these kinds of small businesses.

Business revenue is tight so spending that extra time hacking for outdated technology helps squeeze every penny coming in. It’s a similar reason why some businesses still use older OSes and browsers. Don’t fix what ain’t broke.

This will likely continue to be a problem for a few years to come as the world starts to recover from this meltdown, but hopefully trailing off by 2012.

As a one-person business, I can’t afford to refuse some amount of compliance in IE6 if a client requests it. I don’t offer support as part of my regular fee, but I usually don’t refuse if asked. However, that doesn’t mean I don’t charge through the teeth for it. If the client requests IE6 compatibility, they have to agree to my fee and I write into the contract that the site will be usable but likely will not look or work the same as a modern browser. I don’t think I’ve lost any clients strictly because of this, and I’ve even made a few clients happy by agreeing to add IE6 to my list of “supported” browsers.

To me, 10-15% of a site’s visitors using IE6 or worse isn’t worth dealing with it. But if someone disagrees with me and wants to pay for it, who am I to tell them how to spend their money?

Aside from the strange Essay writing sales pitches in the comments (!?), I’m sure this article will strike a chord once again for most designers / front end developers that fight relentlessly to try and get across to people that websites do not need to look the same in every browser!
I still don’t understand how people don’t understand the advantages of progressive enhancement when they clearly outweigh the disadvantages. Yes, if you want your site to have rounded corners in IE then, fair enough, use images but there is nothing wrong with adding a bit of subtle text shadow, or enhancing the first line or letter of an article with pseudo-selectors.
Those of you stating that you can’t use CSS3 features because IE is still the number one browser are holding back the web technologies, if you don’t use them, why should IE add them? Start being brave, learn about progressive enhancement/ graceful degradation/ making it work for IE6 and start enjoying using these great features that are being provided for you.

Personally, when I do freelance projects and at my day job I’ve been ‘progessivley enhancing’ for a good while. I’ve never seen the problem or the arguement for not doing so. It comes de-rigeour to me and the development team here (and btw, one of the biggest sites we work on (25000+ members) is being re-developed using plenty of progressive enhancements, and IE sits top of the with our users by some margin)

Our IE users will get a great site, the looks good and works well, they’re happy. Nothing breaks, nothing looks out of place.

Our firefox/safari/opera etc… users will get the extras such as subtle transistions, round corners, css gradients, @font-face (yes I know IE supports this too) and rgba colour. These elements add an extra level of shine to the site and provide a nicer experience, but they’re not fundamentals. If you don’t see then, fallbacks are in place to ensure nothing looks weird or doesn’t work.

I snuck in some rounded corners via CSS the other day (For the sake of saving time of course). We will see if anyone notices. Thanks for the inspiration Mr. Clarke.

We’ve gone down the route of sneaking in those CSS3 additions - it’s just easier! That, and there are some crazy old IE filters that do some things (simple gradients, box shadow, text shadow…)

On a side note, I know that a lot of Nokia mobile browsers use very old versions of webkit (I believe it might be the case even on the new phones?), so a lot of CSS3 features won’t work :(
Still, doesn’t hurt to put them in!

Well, I don`t even try that, because I am the one that knows best that this won’t work.

Firstly nearly everybody in our company (I work at the online editorial department of a big austrian newspaper) uses Internet Explorer (luckily version 8). That has two reasons: Our CMS runs best with it and the people are simply too lazy to install another browser. Even all the newspaper guys that belong to our group use IE. Because that’s all they need.

Secondly, and thats even more important, our statistics say, that about 11 % of our users still use IE6 and alltogether IE has a share of about 60 %, Firefox at least beeing on the second place, often even the top browser when looking at the different version numbers not browser families.

So I simply have no other choice than to have a big look the IE-family. Because if I would use rounded croners, gradients or shadows simply done with CSS no one would see or notize it. And there is no, no, no way to change this.

Sure, I try best to get the most our of CSS(3) in terms of selectors and stuff that make my live as a web designer easier and I don’t spend too much time developing for IE6. But in the end, it or IE8 or maybe IE7 is the lowest common denominator.

It’s good way to ask for additional payment for IE6-compatible coding.