Computers
Facebook Improving Chat Stability, Dropping Support for IE6 on September 15
Chat is one of the “most widely used tools on Facebook,” the company says today about its in-house instant message service (although it’s not sharing exact usage numbers). But the main news is this: Chat has been getting some technical upgrades intended to resolve long-standing stability problems. And, Facebook is following in the footsteps of an increasing number of other web companies in telling users to ditch an archaic web browser, Internet Explorer 6. From the company blog post : 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. To give people time to update their browsers, we plan to make this change on Sept. 15. If you’re using Internet Explorer 6, you can learn more about downloading a newer version here. While it’s not specifying the technical upgrades to Chat, Facebook is giving users yet another reason to get a modern browser. IE6 was released in 2001, and it is still in use on many computers around the world, in part because companies have discovered that if they don’t upgrade, their employees are unable to use a wide variety of popular web services, like Facebook Chat.
Facebook Improving Chat Stability, Dropping Support for IE6 on September 15
Chat is one of the “most widely used tools on Facebook,” the company says today about its in-house instant message service (although it’s not sharing exact usage numbers). But the main news is this: Chat has been getting some technical upgrades intended to resolve long-standing stability problems. And, Facebook is following in the footsteps of an increasing number of other web companies in telling users to ditch an archaic web browser, Internet Explorer 6. From the company blog post : 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. To give people time to update their browsers, we plan to make this change on Sept. 15. If you’re using Internet Explorer 6, you can learn more about downloading a newer version here. While it’s not specifying the technical upgrades to Chat, Facebook is giving users yet another reason to get a modern browser. IE6 was released in 2001, and it is still in use on many computers around the world, in part because companies have discovered that if they don’t upgrade, their employees are unable to use a wide variety of popular web services, like Facebook Chat.
Firefox 4 Beta 4 Introduces Sync and Panorama
Mozilla has released Firefox 4 Beta 4, bringing two very interesting features to the table: Panorama (previously called Tab Candy) and Sync.Panorama is a nifty visual tool that lets you overview all of your open tabs and group them into sets with a simple drag-and-drop interface. It’s activated via an icon at the right end of the bookmark bar, which takes you to your tab playground, where you can expand or delete your tab sets, create new ones and organize them around the canvas as you see fit.I don’t see the need to organize my tabs in a way other than the default, but then again, I’m not an extreme tab user — I’ve seen people with 30+ tabs open at all times, and in such cases a feature like Panorama can come in handy.Another interesting update in the latest beta of Firefox 4 is the inclusion of Sync, a feature that lets you synchronize your bookmarks, history, Awesome Bar, passwords, form-fill data and open tabs across multiple computers and your iPhone if you use Firefox Home . As far as security and privacy go, Sync doesn’t track your history, and encrypts all of your data before sending it to the server.For many users, Sync is not only a wanted feature — it’s a must-have. Right now, a Firefox add-on called Xmarks delivers most of the functionality of Sync, and even brings some extra features, such as search enhancement and web discovery. But Firefox is playing catch-up here, as Google’s Chrome and Opera already have a similar feature, so it was definitely time to include something similar in the default version of the browser.Firefox 4 Beta 4 is available for Mac, Linux and Windows users here . For more Tech coverage: Follow Mashable Tech on Twitter Become a Fan on Facebook Subscribe to the Tech channel Download our free apps for iPhone and iPad