Thursday, March 09, 2006

Goodbye Messenger BETA

Like other suckers, I installed the new MSN Messenger BETA 8 (why beta is in all caps I don’t know, perhaps to emphasize its inherent bugginess).  After using it for several weeks, I have given it the boot.  Why?

• I am not a fan of 80+ MB memory footprints for I-frickin-M clients.
• It crashes during the middle of chats constantly (yeah, I know its BETA with a capital B, but I wasn’t using fancy features here folks).
• Waaaay too busy an interface for me.  I don’t dig adverts everywhere and anywhere and all the pop-ups and distractions are frankly just annoying.  It is not easily evident on how to turn all that crap off and I am not about to spend an hour (let alone 10 minutes) testing each and every option to figure out what it means.

I don’t like the way this beta product is leaning.  Part of the reason I used to like Messenger was because it was light, clean interface, and easy to use (contrast that to the horrible AOL client).  It had file transfer, voice and video capabilities, and the chat client worked well.  I don’t need games, winks, farts, tweaks, tickles, or whatever other stupid term is coined for annoying crap bouncing on your screen.

I am back to the older client and I will hang onto it for dear life until Messenger goes back to the basics:  Improve voice and video, file transfer, and mobile options for chat.  Stop the clutter and useless features (or at least let me not install the crap).  Enough ranting… back to work.

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