There are things that can be done to start making your transition to HTML5. For personal sites, staying away from the glitzy features of HTML5 is likely fine. For larger professional sites, we don't have that luxury. We need to innovate or feel stale, but we need to support legacy browsers to some degree.
There are tons of tricks and tips I could offer if any of you have questions on how to solve individual issues, but the concept of modern web dev is innovate, and degrade to some usable (but not desirable) subset for lesser browsers (which in almost all cases are IE).
Most smart phones (iOS and Android derivatives) support enough HTML5 to make a transition. Even, ack, IE9 supports enough to make a transition but you need to handle IE6, 7 and 8 issues for each special feature you wish to deal with.
Personal sites have the power to ask the user to upgrade. For all of you having crashes with your browsers it may be time for some clean up or even (gasp) a reinstall if you're using Microsoft products. Windows 7 is the best of all Windows versions to date, but XP could use a reinstall every year or so to stay fresh, clean, fast and stable (depending on how much/often you install software).
Yes I maintain a couple of websites and wish that I could use HTML5 to code it. Unfortunately it's too early at this point. Not just because of IE6 but because people are still going to be accessing sites from mobile platforms and it will take a while to have 100% of users using 100% HTML5 compatible browsers.
I just use CSS and html. I don't worry about coding special for IE6 as my site renders perfectly in all browsers I've tested including IE6.