Our Download of the Day today is Pidgin 2.5.6.

Pidgin is a chat program which lets you log in to accounts on multiple chat networks simultaneously. This means that you can be chatting with friends on MSN, talking to a friend on Google Talk, and sitting in a Yahoo chat room all at the same time.

Pidgin runs on Windows, Linux, and other UNIX operating systems.

Pidgin is compatible with the following chat networks out of the box: AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, Jabber/XMPP, MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, Bonjour, Gadu-Gadu, IRC, Novell GroupWise Messenger, QQ, Lotus Sametime, SILC, SIMPLE, MySpaceIM, and Zephyr. It can support many more with plugins.

Pidgin supports many features of these chat networks, such as file transfers, away messages, buddy icons, custom smilies, and typing notifications. Numerous plugins also extend Pidgin's functionality above and beyond the standard features.

Pidgin integrates with the system tray on Windows.

The latest version includes the following changes:

Changes in Version 2.5.6

* libpurple
- Improve sleep behavior by aggregation of longer timeouts on second boundaries to allow better power saving. (Arunan Balasubramaniam)
- Fix various crashes on exit.
- Make XML parsing more resilient to interactions with other libraries. This, along with the fix for libxml2 bug 564217, fixes the crashes on connect in XMPP with recent gst-plugins-bad (see #8830 for details).
- Many security related fixes

* IRC
- Correctly handle WHOIS for users who are joined to a large number of channels.
- Notify the user if a /nick command fails, rather than trying fallback nicks.

* MSN
- Fix a race condition causing occasional Pidgin crashes.
- Fix some errors about the friendly name changing too fast caused by MSN/Yahoo integration buddies.

* XMPP
- Less likely to pop up a new conversation window in disregard of the "Hide new IM conversations" preference.

* Yahoo
- Fix a crash when sending very long messages.
- Fix a bug where UTF-8 status messages get garbled when going idle.