Yahoo Messenger 6.0 review

Because of its many built-in features, Yahoo Messenger 6.0 is known as the Swiss Army Knife of free IM clients for Windows. To name a few, Yahoo Messenger serves up a radio, games, a stock tracker, weather, and a calendar/day planner along with regular IM, chat, e-mail, and user-management functions. If you want a lot of bells and whistles to go along with your IM and chat app, choose Yahoo Messenger. That said, it ultimately requires 11.66MB of your hard disk, more than any other IM client we reviewed. You can download Yahoo Messenger 6.0 from Download.com.

In just a few minutes, the Yahoo Messenger installer walked us through the free account registration process and also set up a toolbar button within Internet Explorer for easy access. The sleek, attractive Yahoo Messenger 6.0 interface itself is somewhat larger than those of other clients we looked at but much cleaner and better organized than AIM's. The interface is customizable with a variety of color schemes, making it much more like ICQ.

Like AIM, whenever you log in to Yahoo Messenger, whether at home or from a cafe, it will display your contact list, so you always stay in touch with friends and colleagues. Unfortunately, Yahoo Messenger accounts won't work within other IM clients, but you can use software such as Trillian to mix messengers. You can format Yahoo Messenger text messages with a wide range of font styles and emoticons, as well as audible cues to personalize your specific message; a selection of themed backgrounds, called IMVironments, lets you further customize your messages.