Adium. Tabs. Even cooler.

Serioiusly, Adium lets you talk to AIM, Google Talk, .Mac, Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, and Jabber users, among others. It's much more customizable than iChat, and it also lets me get rid of the damn chat bubbles!

About the only thing it doesn't do well is video chat, but I don't have a camera, so I don't care so much.

Adium has had tabs forever. What's cool is iChat having tabs.

Having tabs in iChat was exactly the feature I was hoping for when I looked at upgrading my G5 to Tiger. Sadly, this particular feature never made it.

As for Adium, I really just can't even stand looking at that application. It's so unstable and has such a muddled interface that I just can't use it...

In fairness to iChat, there's a lot that I do like about it but some stuff that I don't and which ultimately swings me over to using Adium. The tabbed feature in Adium is great and is one of the point about it that means that I use it (a moot point now). However, Adium seems to work better as a Jabber client such that I can receive (although not send) files at work whereas iChat can't do either (I believe this to be a problem with our Jabber server). The biggest point in favour of Adium is the ease with which I can search chat logs for information contain in past conversions - even with Spotlight this is a pain in iChat.

I should note to that while presentation of the Adium application could use some work, it's not unattractive and I've never had problems with stability. Mind you, I've not had these problems with iChat either so that one is a score-draw as far as I am concerned.

again.
http://www.ksuther.com/chax/

tabbs (and more) for iChat.