Lazy-load chat
Currently I believe that all chat messages are loaded in order to display the chat pane. This may become a problem especially for the system-wide (admin) chat, since this chat could continue for years and accrue thousands of messages. Loading all these messages each time you enter the Manuscripts page could become a tremendous overhead.
We should consider a lazy-loading approach, whereby only the most recent 50 or so messages are loaded until the user scrolls up a certain distance, when another chunk of messages is loaded ("infinite scrolling").