Pidgin... any alternatives?

With each new release of Pidign, i am getting less and less impressed.
Since it became pidgin, they have not been able to make QQ work, which i really need. And with every new update, i dont ever see any noticable improvements. And on my computer it uses about 21 mb ram, a bit much for just sitting idle most of the time.

Anything better out there? especially somehting that anyone can confirm works with at least AIM, MSN, and QQ.

Ive heard or trillian, but if anyone know of somehting that gives you all the features without having to pay that would be great.

Thanks

 

Here's one, never tried it though.

http://www.miranda-im.org/

This is pretty cool. Tell's you how to rig Google Talk to work on AIM, MSN, YIM, ect. Tried it once, it worked but it was kinda complicated so I went back to Pidgin

www.bigblueball.com/forums/general-other-im-news/33739-connect-google-talk-aim-msn-yahoo.html

Also there's Meebo, a online client, but I doubt that's what your looking for.

meebo.com

 

I use Trillian, and it works great imo. (I use pidgin at work and school)

They have about the same feature-sets. They both do ok at most protocols, and they both suck at IRC. Trillian has awesome smilies though.
There is a free version of Trillian too, and you don't really lose much compared to the non-free version.

 

I just started using Pidgin... not terribly happy with it but I need the encryption.

Does Trillian have any sort of encryption?

 

On some protocols, at least. Not sure about all of them. I know it can encrypt ICQ, but haven't checked the others.

There is a third-party app that can encrypt most protocols ( http://www.secway.fr/us/products/ ), and which works with most clients (it works with Pidgin and Trillian as well as the official clients)

 

Jalf..just checked out that product - it looks really good, thanks for sending!

I have a question on this encryption - when you sign into MSN for example, you log into their servers and then a connection is made to the user you are messaging. Wouldn't the msn servers be able to log everything you are typing? Or are they unable to view the direct connection to another user?

 

I've used Miranda and it was really annoying. Blocking people didn't work well and it would only let me use one account per protocol and it was ugly and overall lacked customizability.

 

Really your options are Trillian or Pidgin. Those are the reigning champs on Windows. 21MB RAM is almost nothing these days, and you have to remember that a lot of that could be paged out to the disk.

Trillian is nice, but I got fed up with the attitude of many on their site, as well as the release schedule where you buy a 1 year subscription, and they never seem to come out with anything new until after your subscription is over. The trillian encryption is suspect as it is closed source and no one really knows how good it is. And I don't see "QQ" support on the trillian web site.

Pidgin is nice, free, and open source. You can get the open source encryption plugins, and you also support open source.

For QQ, there must be a specific client for it? Maybe it's not big enough (in the countries where people live who develop pidgin or trillian) to be on the radar for these projects.

 

What are these encryption plugins? I guess im just going to have to stick with Pidgin, so if there is anythign i can do to make it better that would be nice.

I would really just like to see a Video Chat feature for MSN and for them to fix QQ...

 

Encryption will secure the communication between you and the other party, if you both have the plugin installed. It's not a requirement, but it is nice, as you hear more and more every day about governments eavesdropping on the Internet. You should check to make sure that using encryption is legal in your country.

Video Chat will be hard to come by in any client that not the official one. Trillian does have some video support, but I think it's in the pay version.

 

Nah, the encryption happens on the client. Wouldn't be much good if your data was sent unencrypted to a third party server before being encrypted, would it?

Trillian uses (SecureIM) 128-bit Blowfish encryption, at least for ICQ, if both clients support it.

About Trillian I kinda agree, but their free version is good enough for most things, so you don't really *need* to subscribe. Also, imo it's a more polished product than Pidgin. But as I said, I use both daily, and don't have any major problems with either.

(I'm also alpha testing the upcoming version of Trillian, which seems to improve on a couple of core areas, among others its memory footprint)

 

Encryption standards are one thing, implementing them correctly is an entirely different matter. All I know is I've read here and there that there might be problems with it, so don't take that as a true problem.

Anither thing that put me off trillian was, with version 1.0, it was all about "Look how much less resources it uses than the official client!". Then when 2.0 came out, the attitude changed to, "why are you complaining at how much resources it uses? go buy more ram or a new computer".

Anyway, either of them works well enough.

 

Trillian is the best multi-IM client on Windows IMO, and it never exceeds 10MB of memory consumption.

 

Does trillian allow for VoIP over google talk?