Empathy vs Pidgin
After used pidgin almost for 2 years now, it was time to test Empathy again and see how far they managed to develop the application. Here is the results after looked at protocols and some main features.
Protocols
First, a look at the protocols supported by the two chat clients:
|
Protocol |
Pidgin |
Empathy |
| AIM | X | X |
| Bonjour | X | X (People Nearby) |
| Gadu-Gadu | X | X |
| Google Talk | X | X |
| GroupWise | X | X |
| ICQ | X | X |
| IRC | X | X |
| MSN | X | X |
| MySpaceIM | X | X |
| X | X | |
| SILC | X | X |
| SIMPLE | X | X |
| Sametime | X | X |
| Jabber/XMPP | X | X |
| Yahoo | X | X |
| Yahoo JAPAN | X | X |
| Zephyr | X | X |
| Skype (via plugin) | X |
Most widely used ones are well supported by both applications–which is no surprise, since they each rely on libpurple as their backend.
Features
Here’s how Pidgin and Empathy compare on features:
|
Feature |
Pidgin |
Empathy |
| Tabbed IMs | X | X |
| Video chat | X | X |
| Audio chat | X | X |
| Desktop sharing | X | |
| File transfer | X | X |
| Network proxy | X | |
| Conversation logging | X | X |
| Off-the-record IM | X |
Overall, core functionality is not that different from each other. Pidgin has alot of plugins that can be enabled, but most regular people don’t use them. Pidgin has more settings and can custom the layout easier though. Empathy can share your own desktop to be able to Remote desktop. Can come in very handy sometimes.
Edit: About network proxy
With version 2.27.91.1, ICQ and Yahoo picks up the proxy settings in Gnome, however MSN and GTalk/Jabber still ignores the proxy settings and tries to connect direct. We got 2.27.92 in foresight fl:2-devel, can be even better now. But dont use proxy, so i cant test.
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4 Comments
Sep 18, 200921:56
Firefox 3.5.3 
Foresight Linux 3.5Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.1.3) Gecko/20090914 Foresight Linux/3.5 Firefox/3.5.3
agree, this post mostly was a comparison of protocols and to backup our mailing list for just the talk of changing to empathy.
i like empathy, been running it for awhile now….
May 8, 201017:00
Google Chrome 5.0.342.9 
GNU/LinuxMozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.2 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.342.9 Safari/533.2
whether there addon for Empathy ?
May 8, 201018:43
Google Chrome 6.0.398.0 Foresight LinuxMozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Foresight Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/6.0.398.0 Safari/533.8
No, there is no addon for Empathy. No extensions or anything like that. Thats the bad part of Empathy.
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21:27
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US) AppleWebKit/532.0 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/4.0.208.0 Safari/532.0
I believe your comparison table is insufficiently fine grained.
E.g. both now do webcam/voip but pidgin only does so for jabber/gtalk while empathy does for those and msn. MSN support like that is a big bonus as they sit on the majority of the IM market and webcam/voip support is considered a must have item these days.
On the other hand empathy has yet to support custom emoticons for MSN which pidgin does. I believe neither supports winks.
While I am a huge empathy/telepathy supporter I don’t think this is sufficient data to accurately depict the situation.