The early version of the instant messaging app is described as extremely unstable, crashing as often as four times in the space of 10 minutes of testing.

MS will release it on Monday.

@cwsmith: you beat me to that conclusion. :-)

I'm still recovering from the shock that MS finally considered putting Audio & Video in their little piece of crapware.

Too bad it's 2009, most people I know have moved on to Skype et al.

One of the main complaints I get from "switchers" (who are, on the whole, very happy) is that there's no decent MSN chat client for the Mac. While this one is a long way from being done (apparently), kudos where kudos are due -- I'm glad to see the MacBU finally giving this app some attention.

From the story, it sounds like all that's been done is the "port from Windows" part of the code, in other words the Mac programmers really haven't gotten their hands on it yet. I'm confident that will come.

If nothing else, this raises the bar on "the competition" (aMSN, Mercury, et al) to also improve their offerings.

Personally, I'd much prefer it if Apple simply made deals with Yahoo and MSN to bring them into the iChat family, but oh well.

I don't understand how any company can produce a beta that crashes 4 times in 10 minutes.

I can understand some bugs, missing features, and UI slop, but complete instability seems like it'd make it impossible for beta testers to do their job.

In my shop, this would be an alpha-level product at best, and would be tested only with the core QA group for limited functional testing, and not beyond that. How it could leak? Perhaps the QA guys were so pissed and frustrated that they wanted to show the world how much of a joke this project is.

What a joke. MSN messenger currently continues to show me as away every time i sign in even though on my other computer it doesn't do that. There are no settings to change it even with ALL related files removed before re-install. It is still only about 50% compatible with windows versions. Now it has a new trick. Whenever i type in a window, the cursor blinking goes away, and i have to click in the text entry field to type another message to send. Type send click type send click.......... Irritating to say the least. What a useless pile of c***. Deleted it for good last week.

Gee. Who would have ever guessed that an internal beta has issues?

I don't have a lot of good things to say about Microsoft products these days (except maybe the current iteration of RDC) but this seems very much like non-news to me.

"the instant messaging app is described as extremely unstable, crashing as often as four times in the space of 10 minutes of testing. It is also unable to permanently save settings, including even basic items such as user photos."
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In other words, just the kind of final app quality we have come to expect from the MacBU. Good form.

To chas_m who shows high hopes for the MacBU -- sorry, it took me a while to stop laughing.

Why again with the minuses? It's what happened. I had aMSN for a year, then i got msft msn because it was more compatible with other msn users, then it started acting up, not the beta leaked in this "news story", but the "final" release openly available for download.... :\

Well, having used it for a few days now it's actually quite stable. I'm running this beta on a fully patched intel iMac and I've not seen a crash.

The Video support is a little rough round the edges (particularly the view of yourself which is a little vertically stretched and lacks definition) but the app itself is as stable as I'd expect it to be at this stage and the AV stack does work.

That said of course Messenger still isn't a patch on Adium, but it's useful to have for those occasions where AV is required.