Nothing against Chrome extensions, but I have yet to see an messaging application that competes with Pidgin. It's simple, beautiful, and perfect at what it does

Nothing against Chrome extensions, but I have yet to see an messaging application that competes with Pidgin. It's simple, beautiful, and perfect at what it does. Unfortunately, Google doesn't permit Pidgin to use its current protocols. So while XMPP still works great for one-on-one chat, my group messages relegated to the Hangouts app. (As are video and voice, but that's much more understandable.) Which is odd, since XMPP supports multi-user chat. I really like Hangouts for video chats, but I wish they'd allow me to outsource all text-based messaging to Pidgin. It's just a more elegant solution... and Google would still reap all the advertising information they can glean from my messages anyway.