Miranda vs. Trillian
As reported tonight, I’ve switched from Trillian to Miranda (for several reasons). It’s been a pretty good experience so far, save a couple of random crashes. Here’s what I love about Miranda:
- Active development community cranking out updates frequently
- Slick interaction with popular and minor IM protocols
- Polished skins are readily available through the directory
- Fast startup and shutdown, relatively small memory footprint
- My buddy list is transparent (read: no background)
- I can see what IM clients and versions all my buddies are using
- There’s a decent “Find Updates” plugin available
- It’s a nice upgrade from Trillian 2.x’s feature set
- Individual message windows can contain useful info
- It’s open source – bonus!
Things I dislike about Miranda:
- It took a full day to configure to my liking
- Options are all over the map (in a disorganized config hierarchy)
- no full support for Skype (read: Skype must still be open)
- Skins aren’t applied program-wide (very frustrating)
- I can’t undo a specific font change I made
- You can’t set a universal buddy icon easily
- User experience lacks the polish of Trillian’s
- Some cryptic error dialogs
- It was designed with geeks in mind
- I’ve been having problems with MSN connectivity
- Random crashes with no easy way of recovering open convos
- I can’t access more than one account on any single network
- It doesn’t auto-organize incoming IMs by preset protocol groups
I’ll stick with Miranda for the time being. If Trillian 4.x can lick the performance issues that dog 3.x, I’ll go back to it. No word on when the new version will be unleashed, though.
GoDaddy Web hosting plans are now more powerful than ever. Best of all, their plans start at just $3.95/month! No matter what plan you choose, your site receives 24/7 maintenance and protection in a world-class data center. Plus, as a listener of The Chris Pirillo Show, enter code CHRIS2 when you check out, and save an additional $5 off any order of $30 or more. Get your piece of the internet at GoDaddy!
8 Comments
Jason J. Thomas
September 13th, 2006
at 5:43am
I have to admit that you will have to pry Gaim from my cold, dead hands before I move to another “universal” IM client. Trillian was always bloated to me, and Miranda seems busy. I like the clean, utilitarian interface of Gaim.
Now, if they can only get 2.0 out of beta, I will be one happy camper.
Caesar Whiddick
September 13th, 2006
at 8:47am
Thanks for this pointer, Chris. I’m currently using Trillian Pro 3.1, but am willing to consider other platforms such as Miranda. Trillian development seems to move at a fairly slow pace, innovation-wise. Anyway, would you be willing to share you Miranda configuration/setup with me/us? I’d be grateful. Thanks for your consideration.
j. brotherlove
September 13th, 2006
at 11:16am
Have you detailed Trillian’s “performance issues”? I’m interested to know what’s so bad about 3.x that you would opt for a solution with as many dislikes you’ve noted.
Martin Andersen
September 17th, 2006
at 3:43am
Re your gripe:
# I can’t access more than one account on any single network
You can too :). Just navigate to the folder you installed Miranda to, locate the ‘plugins’ folder, and find the .dll you wish to add a second account to – i.e. MSN.dll. Copy that to a different name – like msn_work.dll –
restart Miranda, and configure the second dll.’
Clunky, yes. Counter-intuitive, yes. But it works.
Brian
September 18th, 2006
at 9:59am
GAIM started crashing on me every time it connected to MSN (the team actually fixed this problem in one day!) so I went looking for alternatives. I learned about Miranda from Gtalk’s recommendations page and I haven’t regretted it yet! It’s certainly not for the faint-of-heart but I really enjoy that granularity of control. The UI is beautifully simplistic (skins are for gurls) there are zillions of active plugins. I tried the Skype tie-in but decided to let this IM unifier do what it does best. It’s been stable and highly responsive since the get-go.
My only gripe is that no matter how infrequently I set the XML updater to, it still finds a way to minimize the game I’m playing right at the most inopportune moments. I’d love to see a silent updater, and then Miranda will be the perfect IM client for my needs!
GOLIATH
October 5th, 2006
at 6:01pm
I was once a Trillian user, there was a time when I would have beaten the holy hell out of you for even looking like you was thinking of saying something bad about it…………..but then came miranda……..omfg miranda is like 1,000 times better than trillian the 1 and only thing it dosent do is have a webstatus update png image thingy like trillian did, where I can post a picture of my im client in my sig on a forum and it would show my status online/offline….uf miranda made something like that it would be the best chat client ever made and also a myspace plugin wouldnt be a bad idea also
Du
October 6th, 2006
at 11:06am
Its a great messenger over all
But whats the point behind not allowing conference in yahoo !
Bala Krishna
June 20th, 2007
at 4:49am
I have tried most of the available multi protocol messenger including gaim mirinda and trillian. Ultimately, i am back to trillian because no one is better then trillian. However some of the problem are there but not an issue. I like trillian full support of all available protocol.
Thanks