Mibbit, the popular webchat client for IRC, once again made a few updates to their service.

In the announcement they write that, due their tremendous growth, have “expanded from having a single backend for Widgets, to having 4 backend servers” which “also gives us failover, and an easy way to update backends without having to kick everyone off”.

Since all backends use the same IP, IRC networks that use Mibbit for their webchat don’t have to change anything.

The new features that were introduced with this update is WebSocket support, a feature currently only available in Google Chrome:

WebSocket is a system that allows a bidirectional tcp connection between browser and server. Mibbit can use this in place of Comet, in order to cut bandwidth and provide a faster experience for users. WebSocket is currently supported in latest Chrome dev channel. If you haven’t tried it yet, Chrome is an awesome webbrowser, especially for webapps like Mibbit.

Also, a lag-meter has been built in which “shows the current lag between your browser and the mibbit server” and even though this doesn’t measure the lag from mibbit to the IRC network they “plan to implement some lag features for IRC later on.” The lag is “logged on the Mibbit server in order for us to improve the user experience” and “if we find that lag from browsers in the UK is high, we may setup a UK backend”.

Closing the announcement they write

Once again, thanks for your understanding when we do have to restart a backend, we’re nearing a time now where we can do complete rolling updates and not have to kick anyone off.

It’s a real privilege to work on something that is used by so many people, and we really do appreciate your use of Mibbit. If you have any thoughts, ideas or gripes, please do feel free to catch me on irc.mibbit.net.

Happy holidays Mibbitians!

Happy holidays from here too =)