After reading endless reports about the controversy over the non-resizable chat window in Pidgin, I decided to upgrade to see what all the hub-bub was about. Suffice it to say that the new builds of Pidgin are pretty much unusable for me. The typing portion is now only two rows high and cannot be resized unless you fill it with more text. The gist of the argument is that the code already exists, but the developers chose to remove it and then stuck by their decision, despite a lot of user feedback protesting.

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The problem is, like some others, my text box is locked even smaller, at just TWO lines, like below. The two lines are so small on the application canvas that it’s awkward – it feels wrong.

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Nothing frustrates me more than when open source developer’s forget that their users are important, and the few that take the time to communicate shouldn’t be brushed off and treated like they are unimportant. The Mozilla Firefox developers did this to me before and as a result, I stopped using their software. The Pidgin devs are much worse in this case. They can’t even justify their decision without looking foolish. Score -1 to the Pidgin devs. I’ve reverted to the Pidgin 2.3-series for the time being, but I’m actively searching for a replacement.