Wow, I find Adium to be troublesome and I haven't had even 20% of the trouble a friend has. We both installed it at the same time though I use it more often. Adium is in my Mac OS X login items list, so it's always active. I haven't had a crash with the current version .89, phew. I normally update to all new versions a day or two after they're released.

I have accounts for ICQ, MSN, AIM, YAHOO, Bonjour and .Mac and I have a few people defined as meta contacts which is a single contact with multiple accounts. In addition, all communication between my friend and I use encryption, regardless of protocol.

Aside from crashing which I've seen too much of for my tastes, I'm more likely to run into other bugs that just get on one's nerves.

Numbr one for a long time (and it's still not 100%) is the ability to connect or reconnect to servers after being disconnected for one reason or other. Including, sleep/wake the system, disconnect the network connection, etc. Then we have.... Constantly asking for my password for one connection or other (mostly the .Mac) showing it's not using the keychain properly. It always tries to send unencrypted text when I first contact said friend, even though I have the prefs set to ALWAYS use encyption. It selects a different account/protocol to send the message to even though I have clearly selected the one I want in the chat window on initial message. Trying to delete an empty contact group always says it won't delete it because it's not empty - but it seems to be gone after doing it anyway. Poor polish like not automatically closing the initial message Growl pop-up after having selected the chat window. Can't drag groups around in anything but the regular window style (can't really do anything with groups unless you revert to this style first actually), can't drag any group up above the first (even though it shows the insertion mark it won't do anything when you release the mouse button). I still don't think I've managed to get fiule transfer working on any protocol with any contact - outgoing or incoming (though we can probably blame GAIM for this rather than the Adium UI).

The crashes I've had have also mostly been while not actively using the program. I'll just be using Firefox or Word or whatever, and Adium will just blow up in the background. Now it's done it fairly gracefully every time, popping up a crash report window, etc.. Not like Firefox which has managed to take down the entire system multiple times (likely because of the memory leaks).

IMO, the Firefox team isn't really doing anything to innovate and since even before 1.0 had become complacent. I'm sticking with it for now, but in all honesty it's just because I don't have the time to properly investigate or configure the other solutions right now. On top of which is my fear that Safari (even if I do make it look/feel/work like I want it to) won't be supported by as many web sites.

You know who's programs have never crashed on me under Mac OS? Microsoft's. Strange but true.

Bruno