Ask TUAW: What's your favorite multi-network IM client?

I've been using adium since it's inception (with that horrible duck/owl looking blue icon). The only flaw is file transfer support, aka the useless feature in chat clients.

The community revolving around adium, http://www.adiumxtras.com/, is really great. They've got some beautiful themes, and I don't have to do any work! It's all pretty much integrated into the application, just click "install" and then you've got new icons, themes, et cetera all working properly.

Adium X

Adium is the best, no questions about it.

It works great, and (most important to me) I can make it look great with my hacked up GUI. The extras are wonderful (random chuck norris fact generator, anyone) and it just works.

I happen to use the Metal Adium (http://metal.adiumx.com) which is excellent.

I've been using Proteus lately because I find Adium's duck (and duck sound effects) a bit annoying. Also, Proteus is now free (I thank TUAW for the heads up). Once in a while, I'll use Adium just for the heck of it,

My default client is still iChat. 90% of my buddies are AIM/iChat anyway. iChat allows me to use my iSIght and integrates well with OS X's built-in apps.

Help, my dock is running out of space!

Adium, I've used it since the project started. It just rocks. It can do everything I need and more.

Man, I love Adium. And by that, I mean so much that it's *almost* unnatural. It's got a few quirks, but they're miniscule compared to everything else. And the community is amazing.

I used Proteus for a long, long time (from 1.x to 4.x) and finally realized one day that I wasn't using it so much as I was enduring it - so I downloaded Adium and never looked back.

This is a popular topic (didn't even get to the last page).

Like others I have used all 4. iChat doesn't even rate (2 protocals only).

I have been using Proteus for a long time now (it's now free BTW - just register it through the 'File' menu). It's more like an Apple app. Adium is too Linuxy for me with an over-kill on features. Plus I like the way Proteus shows avtars in the contact list "out of the box" (I'm sure there is a extention for Adium to do this).

Proteus. Fire and Adium didn't seem to work well with my system for some reason.

I've been using Fire for as long as I've been using a Mac on a day-to-day basis and have had none of the problems which have been mentioned by other comments. I did try Adium once and besides, whilst it's probably a trite reason, I couldn't take an app with a cute duck icon seriously.

Fire's been a work horse for me and I've no mind to change it; it's currently handling my accounts on Yahoo!, MSN, AIM and ICQ with no problems.

Definately a case of 'if it ain't broke don't fix it' as far as I'm concerned.

I've used both Adium and iChat extensively, and while I like Adium's security features, I think iChat runs more smoothly and has better conferencing features.
That said, iChat does not win completely because I CANNOT get the jabber connection to recognize my Yahoo Services. I have no problem Jabbering into my MSN chat account (I know, I know, but a friend in Europe uses it) but am unable to do it with Yahoo.

Any advice with this?