Yahoo! Messenger for Windows Vista Officially Got F5'd

Long have I complained about the fact that the Yahoo! Messenger team did nothing whatsoever to improve their products and instead preferred to bring up front the older features that they thought people weren't using. And up until today they've never failed with the disappointment, they were like clockwork.

The refresh that the Instant Messenger service got for its Vista version came as a gentle breeze to remind us that once in a blue moon things can be done. It's been attended carefully and several things have been added or fixed, as follows.

Visually, they've cleaned up and enhanced some menus (image picker included), offline messages are shown in a conversation window and have been added a timestamp and a new "While you were out" tag. Performance and stability have also been dealt with, the new version of the client (2008.01.11.428) is sensibly more stable and it responds a lot faster to typing or switching between tabs and windows, as the Yahoo! Messenger blog reads. Some work has been put into the sidebar that the IM came with, so those who wanted to use it, but were annoyed by the bugs, can now rest assured and start it up with confidence.

And talking about bugs, many of them have been squashed with the refresh: the sign in problems that some encountered were fixed and what managed to piss off everybody I know who uses it, the scrolling of the window has been reconsidered. It was fairly annoying to have to manually scroll down in order to see every single message received.

Hopefully, they'll keep up the good work and not stop at this, there's still room for more improvement both for the Vista version and the XP one. Off the top of my head, I could think of the sounds that have been changed with the latest versions, so now a BUZZ!! is more like a distorted excuse for a doorbell and receiving messages isn't so prominent any more. Of course, you can manually change those, but it would have been nicer to have the option to switch to and from them at your free will.