Facebook Promises to Enhance Chat, Drop IE6 support

Article by George Norman (Cybersecurity Editor)

on 27 Aug 2010

Thanks to social networking site Facebook you can connect with old friends, make new friends, and generally stay up to date on what your friends are doing. With Facebook Chat you take things one step further and talk to your friends in real-time. The chat feature was launched just 2 years ago as a small feature; since its launch it turned from a small feature to one of the most widely used tools on Facebook.

The annoying thing is that from time to time the chat feature doesn’t work like it should; which is a drag, considering how popular this feature is and how many people use it. Facebook said it is aware of this issue and is working to fix it.

“Many of you have told us that sometimes your Chat session comes and goes or even stops completely. We're working hard to end those interruptions so that your experience is stable and consistent. In the past couple of weeks, we've already made Chat faster and more stable, fixed bugs and improved the technology on which it runs. In the coming weeks, we will be making important improvements in the way connections are established and messages are sent, so that Chat will be much more stable for you and your friends,” explained Facebook software engineer on the Chat team, Rodrigo Schmidt.

To enhance Facebook Chat and provide a hassle-free and uninterrupted experience, Facebook has to give up on older browser – that would be the 9-year old IE6 (Internet Explorer 6). Facebook will no longer support the old IE6 browser starting with the 15th of September.

“The biggest improvements come from changes that aren't supported on older web browsers. After evaluating the alternatives, we've decided to make rapid improvements and provide the best Chat experience possible, which means we will no longer support Internet Explorer 6 browsers,” added Rodrigo Schmidt.

If you are still on IE6, you are very well advised to update. You could get IE8 if you want to stick with IE, or you could get something else; like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, or Opera. If you want a browser that focuses on social networking, then I would advise you to get Flock.

It’s not just Facebook that doesn’t like IE6 anymore. As of this March, Google dropped IE6 support for its Google Docs and Google Sites services. YouTube (owned by Google) also dropped IE6 support. And Yahoo! announced that if you’re using IE6, you’re not getting the most out of Yahoo! Mail.


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