Facebook Chat feature is undergoing a revamp

The Facebook Chat feature is undergoing a revamp. 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," Facebook's Rodrigo Schmidt, who works in the Chat team,

The recent changes so far have been mostly bug fixes with the team working on improving stability. Facebook says that making the necessary improvements involved technologies that older browsers don't support.

Facebook will be dropping Internet Explorer 6 support on September 15. After that date the Chat feature will no longer work with the ancient browser. The idea is that this will prevent employees from wasting too much time on social networking sites.

In a message on its Web site that also said it was dealing with complaints about the reliability of its instant-messaging Chat feature, the popular social networking site announced that it would stop supporting internet explorer 6 on Sept. 15. It urged users to upgrade to a newer browser and pointed them to Microsoft's site for the newer IE8.

Last August, Microsoft added its voice to the chorus when Amy Bazdukas, general manager for IE, said, "Friends don't let friends use internet explorer 6."

Those attacks exploited a then-unpatched vulnerability in Internet Explorer, and researchers said the exploit specifically targeted IE6 internet explorer 6. According to Web metrics company Net Applications, IE6 was used by about 17% of all people on the Internet in July.
Microsoft will support internet explorer 6 with security updates until April 2014.