Facebook Chat is pulling the plug on Internet Explorer 6. We had been hearing about disapproval for IE6 for a while now, but this is a major setback. Facebook has announced that the new and improved version of the chat feature would not support IE 6. They have provided time till 15th September to upgrade. However, there is good news too for Facebookers. As the Facebook Chat developer team explains on their blog :

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.

Moreover, assessment of Internet Explorer 6 by ComputerWorld is not too bright either:

Facebook has been prompting users to ditch IE6 since February 2009, and other major Web sites and services, including YouTube, Gmail and Digg, have told people to switch or confirmed that they would no longer support the browser in key areas.

This whole scenario brings many implications for Internet Explorer developers. No browser today can imagine to live on without support for social media websites. This growing importance of socially integrated tools keeps developers on their toes to constantly roll-out new improvements, as in the case of Firefox. There are chances that IE6 might come up with support capabilities for reliable Facebook chatting. But most likely, people would be prompted to upgrade to the new Internet Explorer 8.