The latest version of Empathy can be downloaded from Softpedia

Jun 19, 2014 11:26 GMT  ·  By

Empathy, a messaging program that supports text, voice and video chat, and file transfers over many different protocols, is now at version 3.12.3.

Empathy uses Telepathy for protocol and the user interface is based on Gossip. The Empathy messenger is also the default chat client in current versions of GNOME.

“This new stable release removes support for connecting to Windows Live chat using XMPP as Microsoft shut down their XMPP gateways. However, you can continue using the proprietary MSN protocol through telepathy-haze,” reads the official announcement.

This new branch of Empathy is very much the same with the previous one. The developers haven't made any significant changes to the software, although it's really behind the times and needs an overhaul.

In fact, Empathy is one of the last core apps from GNOME that hasn't been drastically improved with the 3.12 branch, which saw many changes for a large number of packages.

Empathy is still very buggy, but the developers don't seem to take great interest in fixing the existing problems and upgrading the interface. We can only hope that GNOME 3.14 will be a much better messaging app.

For a complete list of fixes and updated translations, you can check out the official changelog. You can download Empathy 3.12.3 right now from Softpedia.