Calum, I must agree with you.

Some of these hacks from GUADEC are a perfect shining example of why tabs can be a bad thing. Rotated text will almost always be a bad thing in a user interface. Especially in one that is translated to so many languages.

Please stop the madness of forcing such nonsense upon your users, people! It will only make things worse and harder to manage, and in the long run (or perhaps even in the short run), you will want to switch back to your pre-tabs behavior by default anyway.

Hopefully, none of the Pidgin hackers were at GUADEC and taking part in the tab histeria. I was going to try and switch to Empathy soon, but given the recent news, I think I might have to stay away from it for now. At least until Pidgin ends up in the same boat with lots of crazy tabs in the buddy list that shouldn't exist. Or maybe I should just revisit an old plan again.