Six Multi-Service IM Clients Reviewed

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."

Comments

There's no great client.

[Poromenos1]

I am quite disappointed by the choice of clients. MSN's client is bloated and I've asked them to add an option to STOP THOSE STUPID WINDOWS FROM BLINKING when you get a message when it was back in version 4. It's something like 11 now, and I have yet to see that little option.

Miranda IM is small and fast, but lacks in features and it has this annoying thing where the send control is disabled for a while after you send a message.

Trillian is the best of all but still has many bugs (slow, can't disable video/audio plugins which I never use, it doesn't update MSN names, it doesn't use upnp or let you forward ports yourself, etc etc).

Pidgin is rather nice but it lacks many features as well (ctrl+tabbing through windows never worked for me, pressing escape doesn't close the window, it constantly gets moved to the second screen, is rather slowish, etc).

It's too bad that with this many clients there isn't a great one. Trillian comes close, but it does need a bit of improvement still.

Re:There's no great client.

[kevlarcoared]

In my opinion the msn client is ctually very good for everything except memory usage and how much CPU power it uses when it logs in (very annoying on dodgy wireless with a slow laptop). I tried pidgin, it crashed on me with in half a hour both times i used it, i haven't touched it since. I plan to try trillian when i get around to downloading and installing it, hopefully i will be pleasantly surprised, i never liked the old versions of it (about 3 years ago was the last time i used it)

bitlbee

[weteko]

I personally enjoy bitlbee quite a bit more than any other IM client. Just connect with whatever IRC client you like and there you go! Perfect integration with emacs, no blinky lights, no nothing.

Yahoo features

[Frankie70]

The Yahoo client has some features all of
which aren't available on the other clients.

- At login time, itself you can invisible. In
some other clients, I have tried, you have first
login as visible & then change to invisiblw

- You can be invisible overall, but just visible
to one person or a group of people.

If I find a client in both of these features
are available, I'll switch.

QQ

[DigiShaman]

QQ and ICQ are very popular in China. I'm not sure why, but I thought I'd mention it.

Interesting...

[helmutvs]

Any one else notice that the only product that got their little "ExtremeTech Approved" logo was Trillian Pro, which costs 25 dollars? An interesting choice for a list of Free clients.

Re:Interesting...

[fbartho]

I used the free version of Trillian for around 3 years before I paid so I could play with the devkit to try to make a plugin. Learned alot from it, messed around with it a good deal, and have yet to see anything better on Windows. I use it to manage 3 aim names 1 yahoo 1 icq 1 msn 1 gmail(gtalk via jabber) 1 livejournal(jabber) accounts that are always connected, and then occasionally use it to access 3 other accounts. I like it's logging, I have around 6 years of conversations with some of my friends, soon to be 7. The only features of the full version I really use today is a message splitter plugin that deals seamlessly with things if I happen to accidentally send a message that is too long. I will seriously consider buying Trillian at it's next release, but the free version is really great.

I've played with gaim at different times, and I really like it for the fact that it works on many Operating systems, have played with Gaim on Debian, redhat, OSX and windows, but it yet hasn't cut it for me. I don't have time to try to help the project myself right now, but if I had to point at the client with the most potential, it would be GAIM if enough people in the community were to push it, it could outpace Trillian. AdiumX I've enjoyed for mac, but I don't have much stellar to say about it. It's visually quite pleasing.

All of the clients I've tried have had very frustrating experiences with file-transfer to other non-identical clients. Trillian seems to work best with trillian, gaim with gaim, and adiumx with adiumx. Ditto for Video/Audio and finally, possibly the most frustrating, is the non-existence of a good encryption system that is client independent. If somebody does put that out there, so that clients can interoperate in complete secured privacy, I would switch over immediately, and advocate the encryption of all my e-mail.

Re:Miranda?

[arashi no garou]

Agreed. My favorite thing about Miranda is that it runs very well from a USB thumb drive. Put it with PortableFirefox, PortableThunderbird and a few other flash-friendly apps and you can take your entire internet desktop with you.

Re:And on Mac OS X...

[p0tat03]

Indeed, Adium kicks ass, though what's with the lack of offline messaging support in MSN? It's one of the most-used features of the app, but yet Adium lags far behind in that regard. It's the only thing that sucks about this otherwise tremendously awesome app.

Re:Pigdin and the windows version

[SeaFox]

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

I noticed it. But they did remember to mention that the Mac installation was "complicated".
I also saw them mention that the Yahoo mail checking didn't work. Hmmm, works fine for me.

Just happens to use "Gaim" code

[Midnight Thunder]

I thought that adium was basically gaim restyle to match OSX, in which case it would sort of be cheating to list it separately from gaim/pidgin. I didn't realize there were any other differences..

Other than the common dependency on the same library, known as libpurple (as it is now known), they are very different. You should think of Adium as third-party IM that happens to use libpurple. Adium has already used other libraries for features that libpurple just didn't implement well or at all. The Adium developer work closely with the developers of the Pidgin/libpurple project, ensuring fixes, bug reporting et al.

It should be noted that the separation into Pidgin and libpurple is recent, but that an unofficial libgaim had existed before this separation, and this is what Adium used. The Pidgin team, at about the same time as Gaim got renamed, split the UI and the core logic into two units, in order to facilitate development. There are now three projects that officially used libpurple, these being Pidgin (UI for Linux, Windows and possibly others, where X11 is present), Finch (CLI UI) and Adium (MacOS specific).