It must be said that on Facebook if there is one thing that the developers have never really committed themselves to, it was the chat, put them almost by chance, as an additional outline tool. Facebook chat has always been very uncomfortable so much so that, as reported in another post, there are many better programs to chat on Facebook with Messenger clients .
In these days the Facebook chat has received an update that instead of improving the situation, has worsened it considerably.
It is not known for what reason but the Facebook chat now remains fixed as a sidebar on the right side of the screen and inexplicably shows only some online contacts mixing them with others offline.
In theory, contacts with which to exchange more messages should appear, or better, those whose profile page you visit most often.
To return to the old Facebook chat which, however ugly, still showed the list of friends online without showing the names of the contacts offline, you need to install an add-on for web browsers.
You can then restore the original Facebook chat, the one in which the names are sorted in alphabetical order with a green symbol that shows them online, in various ways.
1) The extension that redesigns Facebook chat to see all friends online is Social Reviver for Google Chrome (has been removed).
With this extension, you can disable the side bar of the web chat of the Facebook site, see friends grouped in lists, receive notification when a friend enters, add the link to the profiles in the chat window and, above all, only show friends online in alphabetical order. After installing this extension, by reopening Facebook you will find that the chat shows all your friends online or online but inactive, sorted by name. The list can be scrolled through the sidebar. When the chat is closed, the total number of online friends is shown. The chat operation is identical to the original one, before the update and works both by connecting in http and https. From the chat it is always possible to search for friends, go offline for all or only for some groups. Another thing restored (and who knows why removed) is the ability to open the profile page of a person with whom you are chatting with a link that is now in the gear menu.
Alternatively, you can try Blue Messenger.
