Pidgin 2.7.0 Instant Messenger Released

While Ubuntu, Fedora, and other distributions have switched to using GNOME's Empathy as their default instant messaging application, Pidgin continues to be a popular choice among Linux users and also those on other operating systems. Seeing Pidgin swapped out for Empathy hasn't let down the Pidgin developers, but in fact they just put out Pidgin 2.7 that packs a fair amount of changes.

The official release announcement of Pidgin 2.7.0 is only 50 words and can be found on their development list. It announces, "Pidgin 2.7.0 is released. Included are a ton of bug fixes, some new features, and a fix for a security issue. We recommend that everyone updates ASAP. Windows builds and source are available currently; other packages will become available as the appropriate maintainers have time to build."

Some of the additions in Pidgin 2.7 that we found include adding a user-interface window for sending attentions (i.e. buzzes and nudges) on supporting protocols, making the search dialog more unobtrusive, X-Status ICQ support, support for HTML formatted messages on ICQ, better support for Yahoo JAPAN, and various other fixes.

Pidgin is now also dependent upon at least GTK+ 2.10.0 and GLib 2.12.0. Pidgin 2.7.0 can be downloaded at Pidgin.im.