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.