The promises made in the long forgotten Yahoo! Messenger For Vista preview from January of this year are finally, seemingly materializing. Last night Yahoo! launched the public preview of the Yahoo! Messenger for Vista. And while many bloggers have been contemplating wether it was worth the wait, I say - "You Bet!".
Yahoo! has done what the Windows Live Messenger 9 team should have done. That is; show how cool WPF really is! The fugly client of the Yahoo Messenger 8.x family was not only ugly (IMHO) but was quite fat. Even with all plugins disabled (I did like the Launch plugin very much) the memory footprint ran close to 40 MB. On average desktops I had seen it run at 70 MB +. I never liked the idea of using a custom skin for any application, it tends to make even the most useful software appear to be bloatware.
The best thing with this preview sans the incredibly smooth and beautiful graphics is the memory optimization visible in this version, and considering this is only a preview, it you can be optimistic that it can be further tuned.
With just the main window open, the memory utilization is between 28 MB to 40 MB. And with a couple IM chat windows open it got into range of 80 MB. Which is fairly acceptable. But the most wonderful thing happens when you minimize it. Memory utilization drops below 10 MB. Yes! I'll say it again - it drops below 10 MB. Whereas the current release of Windows Live Messenger consumes close to 30 MB even when minimized.
