Carrier Instant Messenger is a GUI fork of the popular open source client Pidgin which allows instant messaging with over twenty different protocols.

"What makes us different from the official client, is that we work for you. Unlike the Pidgin developers, we believe the user should have the final say in what goes into the program."

Several features have been added to Carrier upon requests from users, and all of them are optional. It is these options that make the use of Carrier enjoyable to a diverse range of people.

• Every feature Pidgin has... plus:
  
• An option to manually resize the text box or customize the upper and lower limits of auto-resizing.
  
• An option to set the size of the buddy icons displayed in the chat window.
  
• An option to set the time delay between status changes.
  
• Two different ways of seeing that your buddies are typing.
  
• An option to contrast group titles against the background.
  
• An option to use stock GTK+ close buttons on tabs.
  
• Options to always show and/or set the width of tabs.
  
• The option to combine protocol and status icons.
  
• Sean Egan's experimental Adium Message Styles plugin.

Debian, RedHat, Fedora, Archlinux, Windows, Source.

CarrierIM @ SourceForge

Carrier Funpidgin v.2.54
(01/12/2009)

Changes:
Carrier:

• Fixed webkit issue of incomplete loading
• Added bonus libpurple patches for source compile/windows users

libpurple:

• Fix a connection timeout with empty Gadu-Gady buddy lists. (Martin
• Rosinski)
• Don't ignore namespace information when parsing XMPP data. (Michal
• Witkowski)
• Fix a crash that occurred when retrieving certain Offline Messages
• on MSN.
• Extended purple-url-handler to handle "gtalk" URI's. (Paul Aurich)
• Fix the hang on exit in Network Location Awareness for Windows XP
• and Windows Vista. (Paul Aurich)

MSN:

• Change Contact Server to temporarily fix connection problems. (Thanks to Youness Alaoui)

XMPP:

• Support for XEP-0191 blocking. (Vijay Raghunathan)
• Don't put SASL PLAIN or IQ Auth passwords in debug logs. (Paul Aurich)
• Fix removal of avatars (both PEP and vCard), we weren't removing
• them correctly before. (Paul Aurich)

Pidgin:

• Fix a crash in the Add Account dialog when changing protocols under
• certain circumstances.

Finch:

• Redirect stderr outputs to the debug window.
• Fix rebinding actions with the arrow-keys and tab.

Get it @ SourceForge