Yahoo! Chat Clients
What are Yahoo! Chat Clients?
Yahoo! Chat Clients are the programs used to interact with Yahoo! Chat. The Official clients is Yahoo! Messenger, however, this is more vulnerable to attacks, and contains less features, customisations and control; for this reason people may choose to use third party chat clients.
This webpage has been designed in order to give you an overview of the available Yahoo! Chat Clients. It is not a full description of each client, but the important facts are covered. For more information view their websites. I try to give an unbiased review, and leave it for you to choose, I don't selectively choose clients based on whether I like their authors.
Comparison
The table below lists which clients support some of the more important features. Most clients support a basic set of features, which I need not list. Unique features may appear in the descriptions, below. Click a client name to read more, or scroll down to go through each one! Click a heading for more information on what it means.
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YahELite - http://www.yahelite.org
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Not as old as cheeta, but YahELite has been around a long time, and is very easy to customise, most aspects of the client can be customised to your own liking. It's very small to download and is a low memory user. It's easy to operate, but you might get confused at the start. Smaller, limited versions are also available. This client also supports mail retrieval and sending, as well as Yahoo! SMS.
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GOOD
File Sharing
Levels of Spam Protection
Extension Feature for programmers, see YahSeek
500 Quick access buttons - for common posts
Spell checking
Text To Speech
Support for international character and all international room lists.
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BAD
Confusing to the new user for the first 10 minutes!
Animated smileys but not by default and more complicated to setup.
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YaZak - http://messy.zak.2ya.com
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A client produced in Visual Basic (which means you may need the runtime files off the site). It doesn't have the best of user interfaces, but it has tried, and it works well with a large user following, especially those abroad.
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GOOD
Gossip Chat
Auto Word Correction
Audibles
Animated Smileys
Animated Avatars
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BAD
The user interface can be fairly confusing and inconsistent.
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CheetaChat - http://www.cheetachat.com
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CheetaChat has been around a while, and boasts many of it's own unique features. Cheeta Chat is now back in a new Beta, however it's account management facility makes logging in the first time difficult to see.
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GOOD
Auto Update
Compatible with their own chat server
Text To Speech
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BAD
Now very infrequently updated, if at all.
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Y!Epic - http://www.yepic.co.uk
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A promising new chat client from an author who worked on CheetaChat in its later days. While this is still in beta, it has a number of unique features and users are taking very well to it.
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GOOD
Faded and coloured usernames.
Nice, Clean Interface.
Interface skinnable and customisable.
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BAD
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Y!Supra - http://www.ysupra.com
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Y!Supra is a newish chat client. The Login process is similar to cheeta and involves retaining account details within the client. The interface is very clean and tidy, similar to Yahoo! Messenger.
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GOOD
Mininal and easy User Interface.
The taskbar icon flases when new chat!(Yahoo! can't get this one right!)
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BAD
You have to register on the website to download the installer.
Requires elevated permissions to run.
Login and captcha processes are uncommon.
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Yahsmosis - http://yahsmosis.googlecode.com
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Yahsmosis is an unofficial Yahoo! Chat client that aims to provide a working source-code and functionality to the AutoIt community and other users with a variety of features.
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GOOD
Wildcard Ignores
Scripted filters
Spam Detection
User-Groups and Permissions
Open Source (AutoIT)
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BAD
View only Tattoos
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