I love instant messaging. I use it both for work—we use instant messaging extensively at the Orbiting HQ—and for play, talking to my girlfriend, my family, and random people around the world. For most IM protocols, I use Digsby, but for Windows Live Messenger I've always tended to stick with the official client. I depend on many of Windows Live Messenger's built-in features—photo sharing, multiple-location sign-in, and webcam support—that I just don't get with third-party clients.

I also use social networks, including Facebook, Flickr, and Twitter. So, I was looking forward to the new version of Windows Live Messenger. An update to the client I use all the time, designed to integrate better both with Windows 7 and the social networks I use all day sounds great. What could possible go wrong?

New clean look

First, it all looks new. Though the basic design is unaltered, the new Messenger looks cleaner and crisper. Spurious gradients have been banished, whitespace has been added. Some changes are quite subtle; scroll bars, for example, fade out when the mouse isn't near them. It looks familiar, but considerably smarter.

New traffic light buttons.

Windows 7 integration has been improved. The previous Messenger included a Jump list and a taskbar icon overlay to show your online status; this has now been extended with a multicolored status-switching toolbar.

Less welcome is Microsoft's new solution to a sticky issue. Neither this version nor the previous version of Messenger minimizes to the notification area; instead, they use icon overlays and the taskbar icon. This is a good thing: the notification area isn't actually meant for long-running applications, it's meant for notifications.

However, to ensure that the taskbar button is actually visible (and hence able to display the overlay and the Jump list), an application needs to have a window. If the application has no open windows at all, Windows removes its taskbar button entirely—which would leave users no way of manipulating Messenger.

Inelegant, but effective

The current version of Messenger addresses this by creating a dummy window. If no other Messenger windows are open, an invisible dummy window is created. It doesn't appear in alt-tab, and it doesn't have a "proper" thumbnail (instead it uses your display picture), so it never really gets in the way. Clicking the icon opens up the contact list, so the behavior is reasonably sensible—it's just a slightly inelegant hack to accommodate the taskbar's behavior.

In the new Messenger, the dummy window is gone. But this is not a good thing. Instead of having a dummy window to ensure that Messenger always has an open window, and hence always has a taskbar button, the contact window is now persistent. Even if you click the X to dismiss it, it just minimizes. There's no way of getting rid of it.

The reason I find this objectionable is that it means that the window now appears in the alt-tab list. Windows Live Messenger isn't the only application to do this: recent versions of Skype also make their contact window persistent, so it's always polluting my alt-tab list. But it's nonetheless a step backwards.

The real fix is for Microsoft to decouple the taskbar buttons from application windows—allow running applications to create a button even if they have no visible windows. Maybe in Windows 8.

The most profound visual changes are found in the Messenger main window. It's here that the social networking features really come to the fore. By default, the Messenger main window is large. It's no longer just a container for contacts: Microsoft is positioning it as a one-stop shop for all your social networking needs. So it's been split in two: the left-hand side contains social-networking updates, with the right-hand side used for the contact list.





Welcome to the social. Er...

The social networking support is pleasant. It shows a regularly-updated view of status updates and picture uploads, supports Facebook commenting, and integrates other Windows Live Essentials where it makes sense to do so.

Clicking a Facebook photo gallery opens up the gallery in Windows Live Photo Gallery, which provides an attractive and effective picture browser that's a great deal better than the one built in to Facebook.

Old faithful

For those preferring to keep it old-school, the traditional contact view can be used. This has been smartened up somewhat, as it now does something useful when the window is enlarged: as the window grows and shrinks, the contacts re-arrange themselves to create multiple columns.





No more wasted space

Overall, I like these changes. Making the contacts view work better for larger window sizes is an obvious and welcome change, and social networks are important enough to me that including their data in Messenger makes sense.

I do, however, have quite a few user-interface niggles. For example, in social view, the drop-down box that lists my name and sign-on status never gets big enough to show all the text it needs, instead always hiding some text behind ellipsis marks.

I don't want "..."





Definite room for improvement...

The social view also doesn't handle huge windows very effectively. Microsoft says that an alarming proportion of Windows Live Messenger users run with the window maximized. Maximizing the new version of Messenger is certainly more useful than it was in the past, but it still fails to capitalize on all the space available to it. No matter how wide I made the window, it never grew to more than two columns of social information or two columns of contacts.

The big—and some may say, overdue—change to IM windows is that they're now tabbed. Multiple conversations are now grouped together into a single window. Though this has long been possible with Messenger Plus, it's now built-in.

At long last.

Unfortunately, Microsoft hasn't done a very good job of it. The tab support is extremely rudimentary. Common conventions like middle-click to close tabs aren't implemented. Tabs can be detached from the main window through a context menu, but once detached, they can't be re-attached, and unlike applications like Digsby or Chrome, I can't detach them simply by dragging them away. Nor can a bunch of separate windows be grouped together—I can't, for example, have one window with my work conversations, and another for my friends and family.

To my mind, this is all quite basic tab functionality, and I'm quite surprised that Microsoft has implemented it this lazily. Windows Live Messenger Wave 4 implements the bare minimum of tab functionality, and frankly, I don't think it's good enough. This is a shame; tabbing is a good addition to the client. I just wish it was done well.

To top it all off, the tab functionality seems quite buggy. Undocking a tab didn't remove it from the list of tabs, it just made it unselectable. It's a graphical glitch that I'm sure will be fixed eventually, and yes, I do understand that it's a beta (though to my mind, "obviously buggy behavior" shouldn't be in a beta), but given how rudimentary the tab support is, it's disappointing that it doesn't even work properly.

Ooops.

Nor was this the only graphical glitch I've seen; text seems to spew outside the confines of the toolbar in chat windows, and on one occasion the contact list was placed completely off-screen. Ooops.

The mechanics of chatting are much the same as always, but with some nice refinements. Paste a link to a YouTube video (or, no doubt, various other video services), and the window switches to a mode that embeds the video right inside the chat window. It's similar to the previous version's Photo sharing—but made more general. Microsoft has clearly been paying attention to how people use the product—people pass around links to videos all day long—and is streamlining the experience. This capability is also extended to still images; pasting a link switches to an inline image viewer.

"kitten" and "lolcat" get automatic links

Content-sharing extends to more than images and videos. Certain keywords acquire dashed underlining. These words are automatically linked to integrated Bing searches. Opening the search pops up a window that gives Bing search results; it defaults to image search, but other kinds are also available. A search result can then be selected and shared, switching to the inline image viewer if necessary. Whether this is useful or just plain annoying is harder to determine.

Embedded YouTube makes me happy. What makes me less happy is that webcam functionality appears to have been crippled. The current version of Messenger has two kinds of webcam operation. There's "View webcam," which lets one or both parties stream their webcam, and there's "video call," which enables both parties' webcams, and their microphones. "Video Call" is obviously more limited. If one party has no webcam, there's no Video Call option. If one party doesn't want to broadcast their webcam, or their microphone, video call isn't an option.

And yet the new Messenger discards the basic webcam features. It's video call or nothing. I have nothing against Video Calls, and use the feature from time to time. But I use the basic webcam capabilities more.

It's not a bug. It's not an accidental omission. It's a deliberate decision by Microsoft: the new Messenger will have only one webcam mode, and it's Video Call. The company claims that by concentrating on one webcam mode they can make it better. Apparently the picture quality is improved.

In addition, the company hasn't fixed some long-standing annoyances. The current version of Messenger has an annoying habit of resizing and repositioning the window in a more or less random way whenever a webcam connection is offered, and again when it's accepted. Not only is this behavior retained with Video Calls, it's now extended: it happens when images and videos are linked too! Brilliant.

The interface is still confused, too. The menu bars are hidden by default throughout the application, just as in previous versions. And, just as in previous versions, there are options that reside exclusively on the menus. Hiding the menus is a fine design choice if the interface provides a genuine alternative (as is the case, for example, with the Ribbon UI). But hiding it just for the sake of making it hard to find seems pointless, at best.

I like what Microsoft has done with the product. The visual refresh is welcome, and for the most part, well-done. There are lots of small touches, like use of animation when resizing, that makes the software pleasant to use. I think I like the social networking integration, too, and am certainly going to keep it enabled, at least for the time being (it might end up annoying me in the long run).

But the webcam feature regression kills my interest almost stone dead. It's totally insensitive to the way that I, and a lot of others, use Messenger, and the decision is frankly unfathomable. If this change doesn't bother you, then Messenger is shaping up to be a nice upgrade.