Giving up the no <meta> refreshing would be a worthwhile option to enable - if users wanted to - so that they could toggle before or upon connecting a feature that would let their chat iframe "die" and finish loading, but have it generate a child iframe at the end of the latest message, such that it looks visually like nothing has happened, but the chat HTTP timeout issues that still exist today would become a thing of the past!
I need to investigate if this idea would even work - it could be that the parent iframe would still timeout.