I tested the latest version of Adium and I threw Proteus away which bugged me with performance issues (after I threw away iChat before). I am a Switcher now. It‘s not there yet, but it shows big promise and I think it has the potential to overtake them all.

But as the original guy behind Proteus is at Apple‘s iChat team now, I expect something really big for the next version that will reportedly features Jabber support and tabbed chatting. But whatever usefulness iChat will bring, Adium will always succeed in terms of configurability for power users.

However, Adium version 0.7 still lacks basic things like the ability to the the status line that shows up so nicely in iChat and for unknown reasons (but I heard it will be in the next release). OpenPGP support would be nice to have as instant messaging security is a big issue. But I guess this is also just a matter of time. As Adium is free as in freedom it will get there sooner or later.