Facebook's Windows Messenger will be shut down

Martin Brinkmann
Feb 27, 2014
Updated • Jan 4, 2018
Companies, Facebook
|
26

If you want to chat with your friends or contacts on Facebook, you can either do so directly on the site, or use one of the messenger applications that Facebook has created for that purpose.

Up until now, messenger applications were provided for Windows, Android and iOS. That's going to change soon though as Facebook will end support for Windows Messenger on March 3, 2014.

Windows Messenger is a standalone program that you can make use of to sign in to your Facebook account to chat with contacts on the social networking site.

If you happen to open the Messenger for Windows as of today, you will receive a notification at the top of it that informs you about the discontinuation of the product:

We're sorry, but we can no longer support Facebook Messenger for Windows, and it will stop working on March 3, 2014.

We really appreciate you using Messenger to reach your friends, and we want to make sure you know that you can keep chatting and view all of your messages on http://www.facebook.com/

The product will stop working on March 3, and from that moment on, Windows users are asked to use the Facebook website directly to chat instead.

facebook messenger for windows

The Android and iOS versions of Facebook Messenger are not affected by this, and you can still download and install them on your devices.

The discontinuation of Facebook Messenger for Windows does not mean that you have to use the website to chat or read messages.

Besides the two mobile clients mentioned above, you can also use third-party clients instead to continue using chat in a program on your desktop and not in a web browser or mobile app.

Supported are for instance Pidgin, a cross-platform client that you can use for that purpose. The program may come in handy if you are using other chat protocols or providers besides Facebook, as Pidgin supports many.

You can check out Facebook's Chat page for other client suggestions and instructions on how to configure the programs properly so that you can use the programs to chat with your Facebook friends.

Side note: it is interesting to note that Facebook Messenger for Firefox's Social API appears to be no longer available as well. The page returns a not found error, and there seems to be no option at the time of writing to install this version of chat in Firefox.

Closing Words

It is not really clear how many Windows users have used the Windows Messenger for the social networking site instead of other applications or the site directly.

It is likely that quite a few users will be affected by it, considering the number of users Facebook has, and the promotions it ran previously for the messenger client.

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Comments

  1. thebite said on March 15, 2014 at 7:23 pm
    Reply

    i cant wait for fb to get there head out of there ass while leaving shit alone when shit isn’t broken

  2. Astral Spirit said on March 7, 2014 at 10:14 am
    Reply

    This has to be a hoax, I only use a PC & every ten minutes something opens about 20 tabs, all with that message about the messenger. Why would an official message do this behaving like a Trojan hack? It is so annoying,

  3. Gin said on March 6, 2014 at 11:41 pm
    Reply

    This same message keeps popping up on my computer. It will open several tabs at once. How can I get rid of it?

    1. van_lee said on March 7, 2014 at 6:46 pm
      Reply

      if you have a facebook messenger on ur computer just uninstall it by goin to control panel –> uninstall program–> select fbook msngr.. it will work

  4. Zsolt said on March 4, 2014 at 12:14 pm
    Reply

    Huh.
    Thanks for the tip.
    Pathetic. The seventies still rule… And three years wasn’t enough to fix it…

    (Copying Pidgin portable to the drive root made it function. Ridiculous, not eve portable within the filesystem…)

  5. Zsolt said on March 2, 2014 at 12:02 am
    Reply

    @Pants

    “The problem is not with Pidgin, it’s with your settings”
    Nope it isn’t everything’s set fine. Checked many times

    I was using Pidgin Portable, the latest one at that. It just sucks and doesn’t work. God knows why.
    And gives “very” useful errors:
    (23:59:28) sasl: Mechs found: X-FACEBOOK-PLATFORM PLAIN
    (23:59:28) sasl: No worthy mechs found
    (23:59:28) connection: Connection error on 03C02D40 (reason: 3 description: Server does not use any supported authentication method)

    1. Csaba said on March 4, 2014 at 12:17 am
      Reply

      Pidgin on Windows does not authenticate if path to installation contain non-latin characters:
      https://developer.pidgin.im/ticket/13198

  6. Pants said on February 28, 2014 at 6:00 pm
    Reply

    Just for something to do .. I added my Facebook Chat to pidgin .. works flawlessly

    1. go to https://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php (as already mentioned ) and stick in the correct info – use the XMPP protocol (not the Facebook XMPP one) – make sure to enter the resource as Pidgin, and on Advanced stick in the connect server as chat.facebook.com.
    2. On FB itself, make sure apps are enabled (Tools (or cog symbol top right) > Settings > Apps > Use Apps… <– enable
    3. Password (see next point)

    I would try to enable and all i would ever get was "Not Authorized". The problem was non-standard chars in my password. So I changed my password on FB (and in the Pidgin FB account) to upper+lower case letters and numbers only, about 14 chars of complete gobbledegook – works fine.

    1. Zsolt said on February 28, 2014 at 10:49 pm
      Reply

      “Server does not use any supported authentication method”
      Googling a bit turned up stuff where they recomended messing around in the hosts file. I’m not gonna do that because of trashy software…

      1. Pants said on March 1, 2014 at 11:41 pm
        Reply

        Zsolt

        I wouldn’t call Pidgin trashy software. IMO its one of the better IM clients out there. It’s free, advert-free, open source, multi-platform, can use third party plugins (OTR anyone!), and is almost fully customizable (themes, spell checkers, etc etc) .. and of course it supports multiple services. (don’t get me wrong – it has some faults such as storing passwords in plain text and it’s no substitute for whiteboarding/sharing (there are other tools for that) – but as a IM client, its great)

        Pidgin (get the latest version) works with Facebook Chat. Dwight Stegall above, and myself (and Martin), have given info on how. The problem is not with Pidgin, it’s with your settings (non alphanumeric characters in your password? ports?, server addresses? protocol used? etc) or with your router/firewall/system.

        The error you get “Server does not use any supported authentication method” seems to be an old issue (from 2 years or so ago) that has been fixed. You could always download pidgin portable ( http://portableapps.com/apps/internet/pidgin_portable ), extract, run, and try that – at least you’ll have the latest files.

  7. PantsOn said on February 28, 2014 at 5:28 pm
    Reply

    The behemoths are deliberately creating walled gardens to coral their flocks by deliberately abandoning open protocols such as XMPP and creating proprietary ones in order to force end users to use said products.

    I use a pimped out portable pidgin – and I had to go find a patched WLM file/cert file thingie | MSNP (i can’t even find it anymore or remember what I did – thank god for portable!!). After the Skype buyout, the service became worse and worse – it still functioned up until about 6 months ago when I gave up on it constantly logging in and out – thats when I ditched my WindowsLive account (wiped all info,contacts,emails-if-any .. everything but except my name – via the WindowsLive website interface) and slapped on an ICQ. The account is still there in Pidgin – just disabled – I’m guessing it’ll be borked soon, if not already.

    And with each company wanting their own marketing on mobile phones with their app – its only going to get worse.

    Imagine if everyone decided to ditch HTML/CSS/Javascript/HTML2 rules and decided to build their own protocols of how web pages work … wait .. MS did that a little bit .. we got IE6 *sigh*

    1. Zsolt said on February 28, 2014 at 10:43 pm
      Reply

      “Imagine if everyone decided to ditch HTML/CSS/Javascript/HTML2”
      That would be heaven. Trashy dated formats with sixties/seventies origins, also plaintext which is stupid. If webpages were in were in some sort of bytecode(like jave) plus graphic layer (like opengl) format, everything web would be better. One can dream…

  8. Sören Hentzschel said on February 28, 2014 at 2:15 am
    Reply

    ” it is interesting to note that Facebook Messenger for Firefox’s Social API appears to be no longer available as well. The page returns a not found error, and there seems to be no option at the time of writing to install this version of chat in Firefox.”

    The Facebook messenger for Firefox will also be retired on March 3.

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on February 28, 2014 at 8:02 am
      Reply

      Now that is a bummer. Thanks for clarifying that Sören.

  9. Zsolt said on February 28, 2014 at 1:16 am
    Reply

    Any decent third party messenger apps out there? Preferably something that supports google talk too. I already tried Miranda and Pidgin.

    1. Nebulus said on February 28, 2014 at 9:01 am
      Reply

      Pidgin works perfectly for me…

      1. Zsolt said on February 28, 2014 at 4:18 pm
        Reply

        Well, it doesn’t work at all for me. I’s garbage. It always fails to connect with: “Server does not use any supported authentication method”
        No matter what I set. Even though it has a built in support for facebook.

  10. insanelyapple said on February 27, 2014 at 7:17 pm
    Reply

    It’s more like: “We’re sorry, but we can not push you any ads by this way so up yours and use web interface or find different way if you’re clever enough.”

  11. Dwight Stegall said on February 27, 2014 at 4:12 pm
    Reply

    WTF is going on? I installed Pidgin and created an account using the information Facebook Chat Page gave me. I tried to connect and it says Not Authorized. I go to the Pidgin help page online. Here is what it says but there is no such option. :(

    Why do I get the error “Not Authorized” when connecting?

    The Sametime server to which you’re attempting to connect has been configured with a white-list of acceptable clients. This error indicates that the client ID used by Pidgin (0x1700) is apparently not in that white-list, so the server is not permitting you to log in. You can cause Pidgin to masquerade as the default Sametime Connect client by setting the “Hide client identity” option in your account preferences.

    1. Dwight Stegall said on February 27, 2014 at 5:05 pm
      Reply

      Problem Solved: I had apps disabled in my Facebook Privacy settings. :(

      1. Zsolt said on February 28, 2014 at 1:15 am
        Reply

        Pidgin sucks. I couldn’t get it working. I always got “Server does not use any supported authentication method”
        Same with Miranda. Miranda NG was the only one that worked. Though it’s ugly and lacks features.

    2. Martin Brinkmann said on February 27, 2014 at 4:28 pm
      Reply

      Did you check the instructions on this page?

      https://www.facebook.com/sitetour/chat.php

      1. Dwight Stegall said on February 27, 2014 at 5:07 pm
        Reply

        That link is useless. The Pidgin Help and FAQ pages helped me get it working.

  12. YB said on February 27, 2014 at 1:37 pm
    Reply

    With the official Facebook app for Windows 8.1, I see no reason to support this app. If you are on Windows 7 or earlier either use the browser and log in or use your phone/tablet.

    1. dogon said on March 7, 2014 at 8:22 am
      Reply

      Sure just buy me a computer that run’s windows 8 and ill use your crappy software.

  13. Robert said on February 27, 2014 at 1:35 pm
    Reply

    very stupid decision…

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