Maybe for a blog, but I'm not telling 10%+ of my customers to piss off. If the cost of supporting them outweighs the value of their business then I won't support them any more. But I would never intentionally break a site for them.
I'd suggest that most organisations that only had to support 10% IE6 use in the past have already actively made the decision not to support it any longer (I know that happened a couple of years ago for all the orgs I was working with).
For other companies, their customers are 90% on IE6. I know that's a hole of their own making, but in some cases it's a massive undertaking to dig out of. There's money to be made in supporting those guys :)
Perhaps we can take the hit for you. We could cause your customers to stop using IE[6-8] by specifically not fixing the sites to be backwards compatible. Your users will note that although your site still works in IE6, every other site won't. Then if we can drive down the 10% IE6 users of your site to 1%, then will you stop spending time making things compatible for it?
Do you know what percentage of your revenue these customers generate?
Maybe it's 10% of your user base, but 0% of your profits. Or 50%. You won't know until you run the numbers.
Or - more realistically - you could actually consider 10% of your customers a large, valuable chunk whatever the ROI and accommodate them.
Your choice.
As most sites follow some kind of 80/20 rule, be careful to dismiss a small percentage of users if they fall in the critical 20%.
Then again, if you have data that shows IE6 users are just parasites, get rid of them.
I just checked my usage, and I only have 8% using IE period -- all versions. Of those, only 8% are on IE8 or under -- which is only 0.6% of all users.
It's actually kinda interesting to see the variations between industries like Healthcare vs Construction vs Utilities. If I get time maybe I'll write up a blog post.
It's really not as simple as stated above. It's not up to us to kill it off.
If they attempt to access using older browsers, we bring up an explanation page taking them to an ever green browser of their choice.
Anyway, I'm against anything that's intentionally user-hostile as a matter of principle.
That money could be spent on improving the user experience for people with good browsers, developing new services, lowering prices, or any number of other things that would directly benefit the 90% of your users who have actually entered the 21st Century.
In the SOPA blackout, millions of innocent people were intentionally blocked from all those sites for 24 hours. Their convenience was sacrificed in order to apply pressure to people who actually were in a position to make a change.
The purpose of an IE6 boycott will be very similar. The purpose is not to hurt innocent workers who have no control over their computer, but to apply pressure to managers who actually are in a position to change things for the better. Even if the only change they make is to allow employees to install Chrome Frame.
The purpose of deliberately breaking IE6 support would be. . . what? To tell customers that we don't like old clunky technology? Seems just a teense less noble, don't you think? Especially in response to a situation that the free market can easily handle unmolested.
If you want to not have to worry about IE6 anymore, all you have to do is stop worrying about IE6. You don't need my help to do it. Though, if the only thing stopping you is fears about alienating customers I'd certainly be glad to help there - just send 'em my way. Can't say I even know how to support IE6 anymore, but if they've been able to cling to it this long I imagine there's a good chance their money's green enough to make it worth my time to re-learn.
IE6 is certainly nowhere near as capable as modern browser but if you don't need fancy HTML and whamodyne JS then maybe it's not such a handicap after all?
And is 10%+ of the Windows install base really XP???
I'm not sure about XP specifically, but I get way more than 10% of my traffic from IE6-8. IE8 alone is over 10% on some of my business news sites. Don't forget IE8 shipped with Windows 7.
There's a difference between having certain simpler layouts (although that probably affects conversion too), and IE6 actually messing up a purchase flow on an e-commerce site.
But if it's breaking the flow of your site, it might well be more trouble than it's worth.
I work with some enterprise customers and they seem to be mostly IE8 or IE9. We have one dreadful customer who still wants IE6 support but we've officially dropped IE6 & IE7 support. We still do direct hacks as part of consulting for that customer.
A disproportionate number of our most important users are running IE8. I don't know if it's because they're still on XP (and thus can't upgrade past 8) or some other reason.
I'm not an expert, but I think it's so much that IE9 auto-updates as Win7+ does a much better job of pushing updates that include new browsers.