In flight, chat moves into the top bar
If you have flown here on a desktop, you have seen a small dark panel parked in the bottom-left corner of the sky. That was the feed, the chat rooms and your private messages, all three of them, open by default, from the moment you took off until you clicked the little dash to collapse it.
From today it opens from the top bar instead, and on a desktop it opens from three icons rather than one: the feed, the chat rooms, and your private messages. Each icon opens its own panel, hanging under the icon you pressed. Press the icon you are already reading and it closes again.
Why it moved
Two reasons, and the first one is simply that it was the odd one out. On the site the feed and chat open from an icon in the header. On a phone they open from an icon in the top bar. Only the desktop sky kept a third arrangement, a panel standing in the corner whether or not anyone wanted it. Three surfaces, two patterns, and the one that differed was the one you look at while flying.
The second reason is that being permanently visible was not working. We can measure this one. Over four months the global chat collected 137 lines. 54 of them were written by a person rather than the server, and 50 of those 54 came from the same account. That panel was on screen for all of it. Whatever makes a room busy, sitting open in the corner of somebody's flight is not it. So it can stop costing the corner, and it can stop being the first thing your eye has to learn to ignore.
Pressing Enter in flight still opens it with the cursor in the input, as it always did.
Why three icons and not one
A phone gets one icon because its top bar already carries seven of them. The price of that is a badge that has to add two different things together: a line in a room and a message written to you personally. The number cannot tell you which happened, and those two are not the same event at all.
A desktop has no such shortage. In flight the phone-only icons are all hidden, so up there the bell was sitting alone. Spending two more icons buys every signal its own meaning: the rooms icon counts room messages, the mail icon counts conversations waiting for you, and the feed gets no number at all.
Splitting the icons only half worked at first. The three of them opened the same panel and switched the tab inside it, which meant the row of tabs was still there, offering a second way to do what the icons had just done, and the mail icon could still land you on the feed. So the panel is split too. Each icon opens its own thing, the panel says which one you are looking at, and the only row of tabs left is the one that picks a chat room, which is a real choice inside the rooms and nowhere else. The voxel worlds still have a single panel and therefore still have the row.
It opens full screen now too
Phones have had a full-screen view of this panel for a while. Desktops did not, which made no sense: a long thread is no easier to read in a 380 pixel box on a monitor than on a phone. There is a ⛶ next to the close button now. It uses the same setting the phone does, so the button means one thing everywhere, and while it is expanded the flight chips get out of the way. Press ⊟ or close the panel and everything comes back.
The same three buttons on the site
The site header had the same problem in miniature: one 💬 button next to the bell, one badge covering both rooms and private messages, and the same row of tabs inside. It now carries the same three buttons on a desktop, and the same single button on a phone, where the header has no width to spare.
There is one honest difference between the two. In flight, ⛶ expands the panel over the game. On the site the full view is a real page instead: the feed has /live and your messages have /messages, so the panel links straight to them. The chat rooms have no page of their own, so the heading there links nowhere rather than somewhere invented.
The panel goes on top
One more thing worth writing down, because it was a real bug and not a matter of taste. The old corner panel never declared which layer it belonged to. That was harmless while it lived in an empty corner where nothing overlapped it. Summoned over the middle of the screen it went underneath the minimap and several of the read-outs, because those do declare a layer, and a declared layer wins over an undeclared one no matter what order things are drawn in. It sits above the whole flight display now, and below the big map and the dialogs, which own the screen when they are up.
The quiet pulse
The feed has no unread count and it is not getting one. Most of what goes past in it is people arriving, and a red number telling you that you missed 600 arrivals would teach you to ignore red numbers in about a week.
So the feed icon breathes softly instead, when the feed holds something that is not an arrival: a receiver joining the network, somebody's photo, a race, a build. Not a count, just a hint that a look might be worth it. We checked the rate before picking the rule. Over the last thirty days that is about eighteen events, so this will not be a light that is always on.
While the panel is open it covers the minimap and the list of who is flying. That is deliberate. It is there for as long as you are reading it and gone the moment you close it, which is a fair trade for a panel that no longer stands in the corner all evening.
The voxel worlds keep their panel in the corner exactly as it was, and phones keep their single icon. This change is for the desktop sky.