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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."
...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.)
Kopete?
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If you want a very lightweight text-based IM client for *nix, try bsflite. I've been very happy with it.
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).
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.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
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.
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why would I use some adware instead of open source?
In this day an age where Linux on the desktop is more and more common, I don't consider an IM that only works on Windows a serious contender.
[alk]
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.
If man has no tea in him, he is incapable of understanding truth and beauty
I found Trillian to be a horribly bloated, very unstylish, and difficult to configure application.
It seems that the only pluses it has is that it does modern internet communications media (voice and video) on these networks. I'm hoping that they've fixed the configuration system too since I last tried it.
Adium on the Mac is pretty damn good, and deserves the 8/10. 9/10 and 10/10 would be Adium with voice and video support respectively. The interface styles are all very sophisticated and configurable, and it's simply very usable.
And that's what matters, usability. I'd far rather have fewer features that I can use simply, quickly, and easily rather than more features that are exposed poorly via the interface. Of course I'd rather have usability and all the features, but I think that Adium (and the libpurple it's based around) will get voice, video and other proprietary features support at some point.
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.
Oddly missing were a host of good Linux offerings like Kopete (the built in kde client).
They should have called it PING: Pidgin Is Not Gaim.
Fuck Slashdot
Seems like a biased review. Another missing good instant messenger is SIM
Sorry but I had to throw an exception on this one; all that trouble and it's not even a recursive acronym? Should try to go for triple recursion!
PING Is Not GAIM
GAIM Ain't Incorporating a MOP
Move On to PING
YMMV
QQ and ICQ are very popular in China. I'm not sure why, but I thought I'd mention it.
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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.
There are no uninteresting things. There are only uninterested people.
Anyone else notice that they stated that there wasn't a windows version of Pidgin?
That was 2000 years ago! It's improved since then. Have him try it again.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Kopete, Miranda, Proteus, Fire.
Their list of 6 is pretty sparse..
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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.
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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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).
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