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Comment by serguzest | Hacker News Reader

We used to have MSN messenger, microsoft killed it in favor of skype. Skype has been always awful for instant messaging. I don't remember I have ever used a skype client without some annoying bug.

Beside skype has terrible ui on Windows, current version has a bug causes wrong message ordering.

On android, I have experienced all those message delivery/notification bugs and it works slow.

I don't know how the experience is like in IOS and MacOs. Maybe I should all switch to Apple to have the best experience from a microsoft product?

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Skype used to be great (this predates the MS switchover). They were the first major messaging network to get the multi-client use case right (i.e. sign in from your home desktop, your work desktop, and your phone at the same time - under skype this will just work).

Sadly the increasingly forced updates always made the UI/UX worse, the phone client was a resource hog, and they weren't quick enough with a user-friendly web client. Meanwhile Slack showed us all how it's done.

I'm genuinely trying to get my friends to switch to AIM - as far as I can tell that's the free option that comes closest to getting it right.

>Skype used to be great (this predates the MS switchover).

It predates being bought by ebay too.

Slack on desktop is a resource hog. And connection hog.

I believe you. But I have a surfeit of resources on my desktop. The slack mobile app performs well, which is where performance is important, and the desktop version is good enough.

If you can, give ScudCloud a look. While like the regular Slack desktop client, it's essentially a browser window, I've found that overall it works that bit better than the official client.

I'm going to have to strongly disagree that "slack showed us all how it's done." Trust me when I say, I am being forced to use Slack on a daily basis and I want nothing more for it to crash and burn.

Give me MSN Messenger and IRC again -- you know things that actually worked.

I believe Skype actually uses the former MSN Messenger servers and protocol behind the scenes for instant messaging now. Microsoft literally ripped Skype's IM support out and replaced it with MSN's.

Honestly, the Mac client had always been the best client for Skype and the Windows desktop by far and away the worst but as of Kate's bugs are creeping into both.

That's interesting. In our company the Mac users were always complaining about the app quality, while Windows users seemed to be rather happy, until all the ads came in at least.

No-one here uses Skype any more though. It's all Flowdock for messaging and Hangouts for conferencing.

The Mac clients not great but I really hate the Windows one and it feels inferior in just about every way.

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