We are officially joining the Joomla! Template Developer movement to end Joomla! support of IE6. Rockettheme, one of (if not THE) biggest Joomla! template clubs has just posted their announcement that they'll end support of IE6 by January 1st, 2010.  Here's some highlights from his post:

Let's face it, Internet Explorer 6 has had a heck of a run. It was originally released on August 27, 2001 just before the release of Windows XP...Microsoft has now released version 8.0 of it's Internet Explorer product, and even though it stills falls short...IE6 has long had a reputation of being a security risk...including critical ones are left un-patched...due to features that are just not available in IE6, designers often have to sacrifice design elements or layouts entirely just to ensure that IE6 viewers are not left with a big mess...By January 2010, this percentage should be around 6-8%. With the introduction of Windows 7 this fall, this percentage could be even lower...

[Read Andy's full post here]

To add to his thorough post, I wanted to put supporting IE6 in Joomla! terms since we're all Joomla! folks here:

Released in 2001, IE6 is the equivalent of the very first version of Mambo.  Would you want your website running the first release of Mambo?  Would you want template and extension developers to have to invest time to accommodate for that version of Mambo? I'm sure the answer is "Hell no!".  Heck, most wouldn't/shouldn't want developers to allow for Joomla! 1.0.x now. Any web developer that never upgraded their customer's website from that release of Mambo would be fired, just like employees that haven't upgraded their computers using IE6, it's just not secure or up to standards. IE7 should be the browser to be on the chopping block, since IE8 has been stable since March 19, 2009. IE6 should just be a painful distant memory.  Again, think about this in Joomla! terms.  When Joomla! 1.6 stable is released, users will immediately look into upgrading from 1.5 to 1.6. IE is the only software (besides Windows) that's forced developers and end users to support 3 totally different versions, that's just ludicrous!

Rockettheme, JoomlaBamboo and JoomlaPraise will be joined by most (if not all) the other Joomla! template developers in ending support of IE6 for Joomla!  Hopefully other CMS's such as Drupal, WordPress, Plone, etc. will take notice and follow suit.