Author Topic: Why Miranda might blow you away (do you use IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo, Google.talk.. (Read 98,153 times)

tinjaw · « **Reply #25 on:** October 07, 2006, 11:13 PM »

I use mIRC for IRC and Gaim for IM. How does Miranda compare to Gaim?

For those of you who aren't allowed to use IM clients at work because of firewall or install restrictions, give meebo a try. You can even use your home computer as a proxy with their custom proxy server, meebo repeater.

brotherS · « **Reply #26 on:** October 08, 2006, 08:49 AM »

Quote from: tinjaw on October 07, 2006, 11:13 PM

I use mIRC for IRC and Gaim for IM. How does Miranda compare to Gaim?

If you don't use massive scripting for IRC, try Miranda IRC! About Gaim: I know many who switched to Miranda, since Miranda is simply the best when you want to customize your IM experience to the max!

JavaJones · « **Reply #27 on:** October 08, 2006, 09:24 AM »

I switched to Miranda because Gaim 2.x was taking too long to come out and then when it came along it seemed like it was going in the wrong direction. Plus I wanted to get away from GTK. Miranda is great and I don't miss GAIM or Trillian much - only on occasional file transfers, and in fact Miranda is better at this than GAIM by far, but not better than Trillian unfortunately.

- Oshyan

tinyvillager · « **Reply #28 on:** December 30, 2006, 02:35 AM »

*Bump*
For the purpose of a good run down of miranda and a new release

Miranda IM v0.6 Released
http://www.miranda-im.org/2006/12/29/miranda-im-v06-released/

Changelog:
http://sourceforge.net/project/shownotes.php?release_id=474319

f0dder · « **Reply #29 on:** December 30, 2006, 02:41 AM »

...and new Miranda might actually be better for file xfer since they say they've implemented uPNP - we'll have to see, though.

moerl · « **Reply #30 on:** February 06, 2007, 12:23 PM »

pob · « **Reply #31 on:** February 06, 2007, 12:30 PM »

I use Gaim cos it supports multiple accounts of each protocol. I have 3 MSN accounts and 2 Yahoo accounts.
But there are plenty of annoyances with Gaim, too.

Does Miranda handle that properly?

brotherS · « **Reply #32 on:** February 06, 2007, 12:39 PM »

To use several IRC servers, I just copied IRC.dll to IRC2.dll etc. - should work with other protocols too.

Josh · « **Reply #33 on:** February 06, 2007, 12:42 PM »

I just moved from miranda to trillian. While it might not support the thousands of options that miranda does, it is far more stable, has fewer bugs (like being able to handle HTML Special characters properly), and feels generally more robust. Check it out at www.ceruleanstudios.com

brotherS · « **Reply #34 on:** February 06, 2007, 12:53 PM »

Quote from: Josh on February 06, 2007, 12:42 PM

I just moved from miranda to trillian. While it might not support the thousands of options that miranda does, it is far more stable, has fewer bugs (like being able to handle HTML Special characters properly), and feels generally more robust. Check it out at www.ceruleanstudios.com

I truely feel sorry for your loss

I freely admit that Miranda isn't free of bugs, but Miranda's *WEALTH* of options (huge plus for me) lets me happily live with that fact. Since I use Miranda to talk with others I don't need HTML features.

If you setup Miranda right, it's very stable. I'm mostly using the alpha versions, and even those crash almost never.

f0dder · « **Reply #35 on:** February 06, 2007, 01:00 PM »

I do have Miranda crashes from time to time, almost exclusively when file transfers are involved (and no, the new uPNP code didn't seem to have helped all that much). I also miss "custom emoticons" on MSN, which also still has some timeout and repeated-message problems.

I still keep using Miranda though, since I don't really like the alternatives. Miranda is WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN, which I happen to like a lot

edbro · « **Reply #36 on:** February 06, 2007, 01:24 PM »

Do any of these third party apps allow video calls through MSN? My wife uses MSN Messenger to make video calls to her family. I'd love to dump MSN for something lighter. Do any of them have plugins to do this that a novice (my wife) could figure out how to use?

Josh · « **Reply #37 on:** February 06, 2007, 01:29 PM »

Trillian pro does

moerl · « **Reply #38 on:** February 07, 2007, 08:13 AM »

All I can say is... http://www.trillianastra.com/
Make sure to take a good look at the two top blue button links of the group of four buttons on the lower right.

brotherS · « **Reply #39 on:** February 07, 2007, 10:34 AM »

As f0dder said, Miranda is about "lean and mean"

If you want video chats, go for the huge alternatives

Josh · « **Reply #40 on:** February 07, 2007, 11:43 AM »

huge? Whats funny is, trillian is using 4000K Private Bytes, thats less than 4MB of RAM. Miranda, when it was running on my system, averaged 6-7MB. So whats this about huge?

f0dder · « **Reply #41 on:** February 07, 2007, 12:20 PM »

miranda 0.6.5: ~1.1meg download.
trillian 3.1: ~8.58meg download.

Additionally, trillian needs to download extra support files for the necessary protocols - ~245kb for icq/aim, ~211kb for msn.

The trillian installation takes a fair amount of time, it almost seems as they added Sleep() calls to make it seem more "important" than it is (why would DirectX or QuickTime installation checks take around half a second each?)

Trillian loads relatively slowly, the interface is skinned (and doesn't show window contents while being resized), has OfficeXP style menus, et cetera.

As for memory usage with ICQ and MSN protocols loaded:;

miranda: 5000kb private bytes, 560kb working set size
trillian: 31.344kb private bytes, 26.288kb working set size.

Oh, and trillian doesn't even support MSN custom emoticons.

Josh · « **Reply #42 on:** February 07, 2007, 12:35 PM »

While trillian might load slowly, the fact that I have to, on several systems, reload miranda more than 3 times per day on a clean install negates the load time as I have to take extra time to relaunch miranda after a crash.

As for memory usage, again, I am showing 4K private bytes with a working set of 8.4K

Also, the fact that trillian seems to have fewer issues connecting to various different clients and accepting their text formatting is a huge plus. All 4 of my bug reports regarding miranda screwing up with other clients have been negated as "Cant reproduce here" and then closed.

f0dder · « **Reply #43 on:** February 07, 2007, 12:43 PM »

Quote from: "Josh"

As for memory usage, again, I am showing 4K private bytes with a working set of 8.4K

Weird, which version? I just did the test of trillian 3.1 (free). Working set of 8.4kb can't be right anyway, except if you've minimized all open trillian windows and it uses some dirty hacks.

Miranda does crash sometimes, but I only experience it with file transfers - so not that big a loss for me. Lame that it does crash, though, no doubt about that.

And I'm happy that Miranda doesn't do any text formatting, that's a plus for me

moerl · « **Reply #44 on:** February 07, 2007, 12:52 PM »

Well I said Trillian Astra for a reason.. I can't wait for it to come out

. Of course we can't say anything about its performance just yet, but if what Cerrulean is promising is anywhere near true, it will perform well, and certainly better than Trillian 3.1.

Trillian 3.1, even at its incredible age for software (how old is the current build? 2+ years!?) is still the best multi protocol IM client I have ever found.

Josh · « **Reply #45 on:** February 07, 2007, 12:54 PM »

I am using trillian 3.1 with 3 open IM windows and the shipment tracker plugin currently monitoring 3 packages.

f0dder · « **Reply #46 on:** February 07, 2007, 12:58 PM »

Quote from: Josh on February 07, 2007, 12:54 PM

I am using trillian 3.1 with 3 open IM windows and the shipment tracker plugin currently monitoring 3 packages.

Care to grab a snap of Process Explorer showing Private Bytes, Virtual Size, and Working Set? While there might be some tweaking to reduce memory usage (I just left everything at defaults), I refuse to believe a working set of 8.4kb, don't think I've ever seen anything below a meg - even my silly uptime.exe that only shows a MessageBox (written in assembly, just for fun) has a 2meg working set and 616kb private bytes.

EDIT: attached the uptime thing, would be interesting to see stats for that along with trillian

Josh · « **Reply #47 on:** February 07, 2007, 01:11 PM »

I meant 8.4MB, didnt mean to put kb heh. That would be insane.

f0dder · « **Reply #48 on:** February 07, 2007, 01:15 PM »

I bet trillian uses the SetWorkingSetSize(GetCurrentProcess(), -1, -1) hack, then, which basically forces windows to page out as much as possible to disk (didn't think this affected "private bytes" though?), which fails to mask the fact on my box, since I've disabled the use of paging file.

Going to enable PF and check what results I get.

Darwin · « **Reply #49 on:** February 07, 2007, 01:16 PM »

I've been waiting for TrillianAstra for a long time as well. In the meantime, I discovered Miranda and, while I'll certainly be test driving Astra when it finally comes out, Miranda suits my needs perfectly. My only beef is that every time I update to the latest build, some of my settings and plugins will vanish (this is quite random) and I have to reconfigure it. Other than that, it's fine. Of course, this may just mean that I should leave well enough alone - "if it's not broken don't fix it"!