The last few years have seen an explosive growth in the number of instant messaging clients, especially of the alternative freeware and open source variety. The vast majority of savvy Internet users have tossed aside the official IM clients and now use third-party clients such as Trillian and its Linux equivalent, Everybuddy. But one little client that had been hanging at the middle of the pack for years has now shot up ahead of the rest and choked them on its dust.
Miranda IM originally started out as an open source Windows ICQ client with the primary goal of being lightweight and keyboard-friendly. Over the last several years, Miranda has cultivated a hardcore, devoted user community and an enormous library of plugins. The project has changed lead developers a number of times, and yet it has never strayed from its primary goal or fallen out of active development. In fact, most of the time Miranda development takes place at such a fast pace that the nightly changelogs are several pages long.
The best thing about Miranda is its plugin API. Via plugins, Miranda can now communicate seamlessly with the ICQ, AIM, MSN, Yahoo!, Jabber, GaduGadu, and Tlen IM networks. It will also import contacts from a variety of other IM clients. This way, the core Miranda program stays extremely lightweight while most of the functionality is implemented via plugins, so each user gets to completely customize his or her client; remove what you don’t want, add what you do, and no matter what you’ve still got the lightest, most memory-friendly IM client available.
Anyway, the point of all this fanboy raving is that Miranda kicks ass, I love it, and because of this I’ve tossed together a nifty Internet installer for it which allows you to customize your installation completely, then install everything with a click. If you’re still using Trillian, it’s time to switch.
Comments
gaim
and after you get tired of mirandas wacky options interface, give GAIM a try... support a boatload of protocols, supports plugins, and works on linux and windows. yay! oh, and TABBED windows! yaay!
Re: gaim
One reason I prefer Miranda over gaim is that it\'s a native Windows app and adheres (mostly) to the Windows UI guidelines. gaim uses GTK, which I can\'t stand the look of. gaim isn\'t nearly as lightweight as Miranda, either. The Windows port is a 7 meg download, and the application itself eats up a good 10+ megs of RAM while running, whereas Miranda is a 400K download and is perfectly happy using fewer than 3 megs of RAM, even with lots of plugins loaded.
Just my luck
So the miranda32.exe crashes immediately after I load the app... This is just how things go with me and computers I guess. Sigh...
Re: Just my luck
I swear brunslo, you've got some kind of crash aura around you. You could crash a submarine into the moon without even trying. It's insane. What the hell is wrong with you?
SecureIM
Has anyone besides me made an attempt at establishing a SecureIM connection with a Trillian client? I tried, and things went horribly wrong. Things got encrypted, alright, but the Trillian client apparently failed to decrypt them again...
Re: SecureIM
Miranda's SecureIM plugin and Trillian's built-in SecureIM are two completely different protocols that unfortunately ended up with the same name. I'm not sure who had it first. In any case, Trillian's SecureIM will only work with Trillian, and Miranda's will only work with Miranda (although as far as I know, the Miranda implementation is open and could be supported by Trillian if they wanted to, but the reverse is not true).
Trillian Pro. is still better.
As long as you're not paying for it - Trillian is still the shit. Miranda has come a long way but I'd give it a couple more weeks before I switch completely. As far as GAIM.. That's a half assed project that needs to go somewhere or merge with another.
Re: Trillian Pro. is still better.
But that's just me.
Oh yeah, and also, Miranda is free and open source. Boo-yah.
Re: Just my luck
I'm with you, Brunslo. Miranda runs fine for me, as long as I don't tell it to connect to ICQ. If I try to connect to ICQ, it just goes "poof". Miranda? What Miranda?
Miranda eats RAM.
This doesn't bother me really, since I have more RAM in my computer then I'll ever need, but Trillian uses 2.9MB and Miranda uses 13MB according to XPs Task Manager. *shrug*
Re: Miranda eats RAM.
You must have bad user karma. I consistently see almost exactly the reverse.