Best Free Instant Messaging Client

[brunetu]

Hi, this is comment #55915. I had to move it here to not over-lengthen the page.

I'd be glad to become the editor of this section, but I'm using a PC from year 2000 (Pentium III 733 MHz with 384 MB SDRAM), of which Pidgin only uses approximately 24 MB right now, so I'm not available to test other IM clients even for a few days to make an opinion.

As far as I know, Yahoo! Messenger (most people are on this network in my country although this is not the USA) takes up to 100 MB sometimes, and so is Windows Live Messenger, both of which are not multi-protocol and also display ads and are not very customizable. Digsby for example takes quite some RAM too, but Trillian may be lighter on resources.

Firstly, in my opinion, customizability is what makes the difference. It all depends on taste and needs I guess. I, for example, need to be able to set distinct alarm sounds for each of my contacts on several events (logged in, logged out, new message etc.), which I've been able to do by using Pidgin (in the present) and the free version of Trillian (in the past).

As for functionality (basic features), Pidgin is quite stable, but bugs are fixed on random occasions, being open-source (sometimes less often than other times). If I get the chance to test Trillian again, I will be able to mention whether it does what it should do better (than Pidgin), especially file transfers with Yahoo! accounts in my case.

Both Pidgin and Trillian also satisfy another feature I expect, which is logging to human-readable text files (XML/HTML).

Unfortunately, I haven't had the luck of finding a good multi-protocol VoIP / Video-Conferencing client yet, but I understand that Digsby has implemented some of this kind of functionality with some of the protocols. I haven't used Digsby after I had some stability issues with it in the past.

Aspect is important too, and Trillian wins over Pidgin in this case. Pidgin, being portable across platforms, also uses the GTK GUI library, which makes it's user interface elements respond slower to user events.

The best video-conferencing quality I have witnessed was provided by Microsoft's Windows Live Messenger (maybe they process the video to make it look smoother and also have more world-wide-spread servers), which made me feel like the video looked even better than when watching myself using my Web-Cam and an application called AM-CAP on the same PC.

The best VoIP experience I have had was with Skype. Although I personally dislike its UI.

Of all the software I've tried (and I've tried a lot, many less popular free software) some were light, simple and stable but lacked features like Multi-Protocol support (TeamTalk Conferencing System and BitWise IM Personal are very good such examples), and some I've had stability and security issues with many times (especially Yahoo! Messenger which I have had to use over the time).

EyeBall Chat is in many aspects similar to Yahoo! Messenger (offering text multi-protocol messaging for compatibility though), but I've had blue screens on Windows XP 32 bit after installing and restarting two times, so I had to remove it. I also didn't like the interface and the complete lack of customizability (the fonts faces and sizes used are awfully uncomfortable). Has a limited smiley list too. Please mention whether you have had issues with it too or not.

One feature I've seen in Yahoo! Messenger and Windows Live Messenger and I'd like to see in other IM software too is management of contact information for chat buddies (like a well-integrated address-book).

I'll be back! After I've had the chance to test the new versions of Digsby and Trillian on one side, and TeamTalk Conferencing System and BitWise IM Personal on the other side... Maybe I'll even provide a feature-comparison table containing column headers such as Portability (across computers and across OSs), customizability (and contact info management), rich-text offline messages (and smileys etc), file/voice/video transfer, logging (format and functionality) etc.

Or maybe you can help do it earlier if you are already using some of these applications! One way to do that is let me know about your experiences too.