Honestly, I was looking for a big time messenger that was going to out beat all Yahoo!'s past and other popular messengers out there. That came to an end as the Yahoo! Messenger team abruptly ended the Yahoo! Messenger for Vista project. Apparently, they stopped the process because it was taking resources to make a casual messenger (Yahoo! Messenger 9) better.

People that have commented on the Yahoo! Messenger blog have posted mixed opinions. From blaming Vista, to blaming Yahoo! on being too weak.

My opinion on all this is the following. I think the Yahoo! Messenger team WAS too weak. The fact that creating such a powerful messenger was just too much for the team. Not only that, I think the "team" is just a few members, 10 at most. Though it is hard to build a software from the ground up, it must have been done. Yahoo! is the last messenger giant that I'd expect to back off. This really puts them on a low spot, starting something millions of loyal users found interesting and used then just scraped it. This is a low move for Yahoo! Messenger.

I already downloaded it for testing but I'm sticking to Firefox. It's too sluggish and makes me wanna go back to IE7. But I guess every new beta has it's little issues. I took some screen shots of the full screen and the "About" for version.

IE8


IE8 - version