Hi,
it's a little strange, but I actually hope you don't fix the friends list bug for 2 reasons.
First, it's useful for quickly looking at your status without opening the online users list, in order to see if it fits the character limit.
Second and more important for me, I use it as a small workaround for a web client bug / limitation. On iOS or Mac, no sound plays until you click something on the page. The problem is that for instance, you may receive a private message, but only activate an option a minute later, and thus you have no idea when that message was received and need to scroll back through the history. What I do here is I keep one request to myself in the list. Thus, as soon as I enter and click any option, Playroom makes the request received sound, and from that point sound playback works as usual. So if you do plan to resolve this, please at least add a sound when a connection is established on the web client, so that a sound is played as soon as you click any option upon loading the page and thus this workaround wouldn't be needed.
Sorry by the way as this isn't really related to the beta, but someone else posted about this bug here so I wanted to mention it in case you do indeed plan to resolve that. In my opinion it doesn't really cause major issues, and it's a type of bug you're intentionally causing yourself, but I'd also understand the logic behind solving it, as long as you keep the web client problem in mind.
Something that is however related to the beta, but don't know if it's possible to solve, in Chess, possibly go as well, if you lose your connection the bot is totally frozen even after you reconnect. Keep in mind that it freezes even if it was your turn when you got disconnected. If it's possible, after reconnecting it should resume it's play, for example it does that successfully in C4 or Reversi.
Thanks.