Instant Messenger recommendations

[Lou3]

What instant messenger do you prefer? Trillian and Miranda look good, but I'd like to get some recommendations before installing anything.

 

[LeStEr]

IcQ

 

[Rand]

The ones I've bothered with enough to have an opinion....

ICQ-
Pros:
Tons of features, and a few extremely handy capabilities. Almost everyone uses it. Tons of "hacks" to alter it to your desires, and easily obtainable instructions on many sites to "modify" it yourself if desired.
Cons:
Bloated, buggy, more insecure then the alternatives. embedded ads, resource hog....

MSN Messenger-
Pros:
It's popularity seems to be growing fastm and it pretty stable.
Cons:
Few features and severely lacking in capabilities, can't configure keyboard shortcuts, tied to Windows, slightly high resource usage, insecure....

Trillian-
Pros:
Attractive GUI, Extremely versatile and compatible with multiple IM's, Skinnable

Cons: May experience minor interoperatbility issues communicating with certain IM's. Still lacking in a few handy features compared to more established IM's. Primarily a niche product from a small company, so support is lacking compared to Yahoo/MSN/ICQ IM's. Insecure. GUI is still a work in progress and lacks the ease of use available with other IM's.

 

[MainFramed]

i think there all great and if you cant make up your mind, get em all use Trillian

if you go with aim on its own get AIM +

 

[Moonbender]

Miranda is AWESOME. I tried basically all alternative IMs, including Trillian, and Miranda is the best by far, IMHO. Trillian is nice, but is fine tuned for so many functions I don't need that it's not practical to use for me. It's also a case of a jack of all trades, Trillian does a whole lot of things, but I found many individual features to be lacking - for instance, the IRC client kinda sucks (again, IMHO).
Miranda on the other hand has formed to be exactly what I was looking for - it imported everything in my ICQ database, including my IM history of the past years (that was really a major factor to me), it's highly customisable out of the box and by the way of plugins, it doesn't do more or less than it's supposed to do, and last but not least, it's extremely lightweight, using about half the amount of RAM ICQ 2001 used and starting it up happens virtually instantly instead of taking like 10 seconds.

 

[datalink7]

Trillian

 

[Gretzky]

i second trillian. Awesome chat program.

 

[Lonyo]

Trillian sucks IMHO, it tries to be lots of things and doesn't do most of them that well. I prefer the full programs as they are fully featured, even though they use more resources. Get mIRC and MSN messenger because usually they are quite good, I personally haven't had many problems with MSN messenger in a while.

 

[KParks]

trillian, can be icq, aim, whatever

 

[FuManStan]

I use AIM and MSN Messenger

 

[NakaNaka]

I use Trillian. Don't love the default skin, but there are plenty. No compatibility issues yet here, basically because I think AOL gave up trying to get around them. It's an excellent ad-free program. Efficent, not heavy on the resources. Automatically logs, can set tons of custom alerts, so man prefrences. It's great.

There is no reason to use anything else

 

[randomlinh]

trillian. it may not do things to the full of the programs, but it lets you chat.. and that's all i want.. and skinable I only really use aim on there.. hehe

 

[joinT]

Originally posted by: Gretzky
i second trillian. Awesome chat program.

 

[neomits]

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umm its the best

 

[LanEvoVI]

I only really use aol instant messenger so i'm a big fan of AIM+

 

[Jayczar]

I use Imici, you can configure accounts on AOL, ICQ, MSN and Yahoo
with just one program. By the sound of it Trillian is a winner as well.