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Six Multi-Service IM Clients Reviewed

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the trillian-for-the-win dept.

mikemuch writes "It's been a while since AOL stopped trying to jam third-party IM clients, and their use is now a fairly common desktop experience. ExtremeTech has posted a roundup of free alternatives to the standard IM software from the big boys — AIM, Yahoo Messenger, and MSN (now Windows Live) Messenger. The products are a mixed bag, some of them Web 2.0-based, like the excellent meebo and the ad-heavy eBuddy. Most give you combined message windows with tabs. GAIM is now Pidgin, Meetro tries to get you chatting with locals, and Trillian, now at version 3.1, remains the client to beat."

17 of 258 comments (clear)

  1. And on Mac OS X... by daveschroeder · · Score: 5, Informative

    ...as noted in the article but not in the summary, the "client to beat" is the excellent free, open source, GPL-licensed, and highly customizable Adium (more info).

    (The summary does mention the other five of the six clients reviewed in the article.)

    1. Re:And on Mac OS X... by Mattintosh · · Score: 2, Informative

      It hit 1.0 a while back (currently at 1.0.4, I think), and it's definitely the one to beat.

      My only gripe with it so far is that it won't kick my Yahoo user off another client in the (frequent) case that I forgot to shut down my IM client at work and try to use it at home. It has no problem ousting MSN or AIM, and other clients have no trouble with Yahoo either, so I know it's possible. Probably just a bug.

    2. Re:And on Mac OS X... by Kadin2048 · · Score: 3, Informative

      I don't think you should put it that negatively.

      Gaim/Pidgin is broken into two components. It has a library part and a UI part. Most Linux users think of these as one product, but Adium uses the gaimlib backend but then has a very polished Mac frontend that uses it.

      It also incorporates OTR messaging, pretty robust logging features, good account-management ... all in all, its frontend and UI are far better, IMO anyway, than Gaim's is on Linux or Windows. (And it's better than the vendor-supplied clients, obviously ... but sending scraps of your own flesh by carrier pigeon are also better than those bloated nightmares.)

      As far as a user is concerned, Adium is an entirely different product from Gaim/Pidgin, because even though it uses the same communication libraries, all the UI is different.

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    3. Re:And on Mac OS X... by Midnight+Thunder · · Score: 2, Informative

      As a recent convert from Windows and Trillian, Adium really impressed me. Fast, non-bloated, gorgeous UI, very customizable. The only thing that Trillian has it beat on is support of video and audio chat.

      Yup, it this is certainly a major feature that is missing. Up until now the developers of Adium have not wanted to touch this, since they say this is not in their realm of expertise. Since Adium is using libpurple, this support will likely come once it is incorporated into the library. This is something which is getting some focus, but I don't know the exact timeline.

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  2. bsflite by John+Nowak · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you want a very lightweight text-based IM client for *nix, try bsflite. I've been very happy with it.

    1. Re:bsflite by vhogemann · · Score: 2, Informative

      Try centericq then...

      Despite the name, it does MSN, Yahoo, AIM, Jabber(gTalk)... and ICQ.

      --
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  3. Miranda? by PhrostyMcByte · · Score: 5, Informative

    What about Miranda? It starts out minimal, supports all the regular IM service, and lets you extend it as far as you want with addons (there are many to choose from).

    1. Re:Miranda? by Xeriar · · Score: 2, Informative

      When I load up Miranda (~200 contacts between AIM, ICQ, YIM, MSN, and GTalk), it takes up a whopping three megabytes of RAM.

      Occasionally group features and file sends get broken for some protocols (sadness) but nothing beats its footprint.

      --
      I am a science fantasy fan
  4. Trillian... by morari · · Score: 2, Informative

    I've been using Trillian for years and still like it the best. Gaim is nice in it's simplicity and cross platform use however. I keep trying Kopete but never use it frequently enough to adjust to its little quirks.

    --
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  5. adless, one page by froggero1 · · Score: 2, Informative

    ad free, single page version

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  6. SIM by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Seems like a biased review. Another missing good instant messenger is SIM

  7. Re:There's no great client. by Poromenos1 · · Score: 3, Informative

    I would like to retract some of what I said. I just downloaded the latest Miranda version to see how far it had gone and I must say that I am impressed. There are many plugins and it loads in under half a second on my 5 year old machine. I am confident that once I wade through the hundreds (literally) of options, I will have it working just the way I like it. I urge you all to try it. There is even a tabbed windows plugin, it looked good in the default install, I changed an option and now it looks like crap (literally, it's light brown).

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  8. Pigdin and the windows version by AntiTuX · · Score: 3, Informative

    Anyone else notice that they stated that there wasn't a windows version of Pidgin?

    1. Re:Pigdin and the windows version by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative
      Yeah, in the table at the end. Amazingly, they somehow managed to get a Windows version:

      You can download the source if you're into compiling your own software, or get a prepackaged version for Windows and Fedora Core... We downloaded the Windows installer.
  9. Re:There's no great client. by jacksonj04 · · Score: 2, Informative

    Trillian 4 seems pretty sturdy, and the featureset matches most of the native clients. Sadly all but critical fixes for the 3.x series seem to have ceased in favour of v4 development, but on the plus side it looks to be set to re-affirm Trillian's place as 'the best' of the multi-IM clients.

    --
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  10. Trillian is slow by VGfort · · Score: 2, Informative

    Try having 200+ or 400+ people on Trillian and its slow as hell to load. Pidgin, loads them all up within a few seconds. Trillian is awesome, but I got tired of it having to load.

  11. Re:No plugins in Adium? by VGPowerlord · · Score: 4, Informative

    That's OK, according to the table at the end of the article, Pidgin can't be installed on Windows, even though they tested using the Windows version.

    Which I think tells a lot about this report's accuracy.

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