Pidgin, the universal instant messaging (IM) client that provides support for a wide variety of IM networks, has reached another important milestone in its development process. To be more precise, version 2.7.0 has been released to the public. The update, as Pidgin developer John Bailey said, comes with “a ton of bug fixes, some new features, and a fix for a security issue.”

The first thing you will notice is the fact that Pidgin 2.7.0 comes with a new user interface (UI) for sending attentions to other users. You know, things like a nudge or a buzz, on protocols that support such features. You will also notice that Pidgin 2.7.0 integrates in the system tray better – this is because it uses G!tkStatusIcon.

Pidgin developer John Bailey highlighted these other improvements/changes that you can expect to get from Pidgin version 2.7.0:

• You can now use clientLogin and SSL together because AIM and ICQ clientLogin issues have been resolved.
• The internal libgadu has been upgraded, thus solving the problems between Windows and Gadu-Gadu.
• The Yahoo! and Yahoo! Japan plugins now retrieve connect server information directly from Yahoo
• X-Status support added for ICQ.
• Minimum GTK+ and GLib requirements are now 2.10.0 and 2.12.0, respectively.
• The Windows installer no longer installs a system-wide copy of GTK+, it installs GTK+ locally to the Pidgin installation. This may result in some GTK+ theming problems.

From a security point of view, Pidgin 2.7.0 solves a denial of service vulnerability that, if exploited by someone with malicious intent, could allow an attacker to crash a targeted client. The vulnerability plagued libpurple's MSN protocol plug-in and was related to emoticons. The vulnerability in question did not allow an attacker to remotely execute code on the targeted machine.

If you would like to get Pidgin 2.7.0, you can download the application here.
A complete list of changes in Pidgin 2.7.0 is available here.