Yahoo Messenger for Vista preview available

Yahoo is set to release a preview of Yahoo Messenger for Vista on Thursday.

It's just a preview, or a very early version, so it doesn't have all the features other versions of Yahoo Messenger do, such as voice, Webcam, chat rooms, text messaging to mobile phones, easy photo sharing and conferencing. Those features will come later.

What it does have is a new interface, and it lets you organize conversations into tabs and drag and drop tabs out to create a new window. You can also keep favorite contacts by dragging them into the Windows Sidebar gadget, send enhanced emoticons, change the color of IM windows, adjust the display size of the contacts, arrange your contact list into multiple columns, and send files as large as 2 gigabytes.

"We know it's been a long wait for Yahoo Messenger for Vista and we can't thank you enough for your patience," says Josh Jacobson, senior product manager for Yahoo Messenger for Vista.

Yahoo offers preview for Yahoo Messenger for Vista users.

(Credit: Yahoo)

[uzair21]

Looks nice

Yeas it looks nice. Waiting for it to get launched.

[rahilm]

Finally

It looks a bit different with the completely transparent window borders. But it is kinda late now. People have lost some interest in it and it had a special Fantasy Football plugin I think, but now Fantasy Football is into playoffs, which means there are only a couple weeks left

[HlLLARY CLITON]

How about a nice version for XP

Vista is a dud, most everyone is still using XP

[Stating]

Where Are All The Ads?

Yahoo Messenger for XP has annoying rotating ads plastered at the bottom. Does the Vista version have this too?

[anonymuos]

Not justified

It's written in WPF and WPF is also available on Windows XP. Why is Yahoo! keeping it Vista exclusive?

[Hoopskier]

Because WPF is even slower on XP

On Vista (assuming you have a WDDM video driver), WPF has decent performance. On XP, WPF's ability to use the hardware is severely limited, thus its performance is even worse than WPF on Vista (which isn't too good to begin with).

[gsmiller88]

No wonder it took so long...

Why bother developing an application for an OS no one hardly
uses?! :D