We’ve all experienced it – one minute you’re chatting with a friend via Facebook chat, and the next minute, you’re cut off. Worse, you might be typing in novella detailing the funny experience you had during the day, and then having to refresh your browser because the chat window just froze and wouldn’t respond no matter what you do. Yes, no one is denying it – Facebook Chat is as buggy as stale bread full of weevils. (So why do we continue using it? Darned if I know!)
Anyway, if Rodrigo Schmidt of Facebook is to be believed, we are soon going to enjoy an uninterrupted chat experience. Right on our favorite browsers. He says:
The good news: We’ve already made progress, and we’re taking some more big steps in the coming weeks. For example, 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.
We know you want Chat to be hassle-free and uninterrupted. 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.
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.
I don’t know about you, but I haven’t really seen any improvements in the past couple of weeks. It’s not any worse, but it’s not any better either. Still, if Facebook wants to keep their users happy, they definitely will work on this feature. In the meantime, if any of you are still using IE6 (I highly doubt it), then you have a couple of weeks to switch.
The big question remains: will this move really make Facebook Chat better for all of us (regardless of the browser being used)? You tell me.
Photo credit: Greysquare