Recently we’ve received many questions from users whose Facebook Chat accounts will no longer connect in Instantbird.

Facebook officially deprecated its XMPP gateway on April 30th, 2015, but it continued to function until recently. Unfortunately it appears this is no longer the case.

After investigating the issue, we have been unable to find a workaround to keep it working. However, since Facebook deprecated the gateway, it’s surprising it even worked for this long!

Meanwhile, libpurple has a new protocol plugin that uses Facebook’s proprietary chat API, which we are considering offering as part of a future release of Instantbird.

Stay tuned!

Following the release of Instantbird 1.0, we’ve received a variety of great feedback (if you haven’t read some of our other posts: we love to receive feedback, although we might not always agree) via our contact email address, our IRC channel, our bug tracker, Twitter and what ever other ways there are to communicate with us. We’d like to take some time to respond to some of the popular requests we’ve got (or at the very least, point you to the bug where you can follow any progress).

File transfer support: something we definitely want, but we also want to give a good user experience. Unfortunately most protocols do not transfer files efficiently or quickly (and many times they break when behind firewalls, etc.), thus we wish to offer an alternative to using the protocol file transfer before providing support for it: see bug 9.

Grouping buddies first by protocol then by group: this has been requested by multiple individuals, but we don’t feel it would fit well into Instantbird. Instantbird is a multi-protocol instant messaging client that aims to integrate all of your accounts together (therefore it doesn’t make sense to separate your accounts on the contact list).

For example, is your “Friend” not your friend whether it’s your MSN account, your AIM account or your Facebook account? Of course they still are! But perhaps you have different groups of friends on MSN than on AIM (maybe one is your online gaming buddies and one is your high school friends); well our suggestion is to move them to tags that make more sense (i.e. make an “Online Gaming Buddies” tag for all your MSN friends and a “School Friends” tag for all your AIM friends, in this example).

When asking people why they want this, the response usually is “that’s what <another IM client> does”. Well, ok but we wish that you take more of a ‘contact level view’ of people: Combine your contacts that are the same person and group them according to how you know them. (You can even put them in multiple tags, if someone is your online gaming buddy AND from school!)

If there’s a usecase that we’re not covering here, please let us know! (And don’t forget that Instantbird is fully extensible, so you could certainly write an extension to display the contacts grouped first by protocol if you really need that feature.)

Blocking buddies at the protocol level: unfortunately support for this isn’t great depending on the protocol, but libpurple does support it. We have two bugs on file; one is to block individual users and another to block all buddies not on your buddy list, which might not be supported by all protocols.

Blocking spam: although this is similar to blocking buddies, it’s different in that you do not wish to block ALL people not on your buddy list, but of course you still want to ignore the obvious spam messages! See bug 288 and bug 887 for two ideas on how to implement this.

Start with the operating system: many people expect an IM client to start with their operating system and although most operating systems provide a way to manually make a program start on boot, it would be convenient for Instantbird to provide an option to do this. This was requested in bug 376.

Facebook “Not Authorized” error: we added the solution to the FAQ.

Voice/video: we’d love to support voice/video too! But libpurple does not yet support voice/video on Windows or Mac, you can see bug 568 for some information on how we could support it in JavaScript protocols.

OTR (off the record messaging): private messaging is something we believe is useful, but it needs to be convenient and transparent to the users (after authentication, of course!). Encrypted chat is not a trivial task, especially when the protocols don’t support it, but there’s a library (called Off the Record) which handles this for us, we have a bug about integrating it: bug 877.

People want 64-bit Linux versions: we actually currently supply unsupported 64-bit builds, and there’s a bug about making them official (bug 395).

Instantbird interrupts you: if you receive a new IM window Instantbird rudely pops to the front, this is mostly noticeable when using another application as a fullscreen window (bug 926). Luckily for now, there’s currently an easy workaround: keep a conversation window opened and minimized, so that a new conversation appears in a tab of the existing window instead of a new window.

Being able to search/filter the contacts would be helpful: we agree! In fact we filed a bug about it: bug 631.

Lots of positive feedback! Including that Instantbird works great with screen readers! We’ve received TONS of other great feedback as well, this is just a summary of the popular feedback we’ve received.

Please remember that one of the team’s goals is to keep Instantbird as light as possible, and for that reason, we are trying to encourage the idea of creating add-ons for things that may not seem as a core necessity for the larger audience.

Development of Instantbird 1.1 is already well underway. We have a tentative roadmap for it. We definitely plan to release faster than we used to do before Instantbird 1.0. Our current target date for the next release is the end of September!

Recently users started to get an error (“Error: Unknown reason”) while attempting to connect to ICQ. This is being tracked in bug 582. This will occur using Instantbird 0.2 or 0.3a1pre nightly builds, if you are not seeing this error then the rest of this post can be disregarded.

Luckily there is an easy work around for now:

1. Open the account manager (“Tools” > “Accounts”)
2. Select your ICQ account and click “Properties”
3. On the “Advanced Options” tab
   • change the “Server” to “login.icq.com”
   • deselect “Use SSL”
   • deselect “Use clientLogin”

Other third party instant messaging clients using one of the “old” login servers were also affected.

Instantbird 0.2 uses the multitouch feature of Macbook touchpads in conversation windows:

• Pinch in or out 2 fingers to change the zoom level.
• Swipe up (3 fingers) to scroll to the top of the conversation, down to scroll to the last message. This saves time when looking for an old messages in the conversation (for example, using the Find feature) and then going back to the display of the most recent messages.
• Twist left or right to select the tab at the left or right of the currently selected tab.
• Swipe left or right (3 fingers) to change the selected tab to the previously selected tab. This gesture is probably the most useful one: it’s very convenient when reading quickly a message in a newly opened tab and then going back to the conversation tab where an active conversation is occurring, or when actively participating in 2 discussions and repeatedly switching between 2 tabs.