Current version is broken in OSX 108 Mountain Lion

I've been waiting patiently, using V 2.8, hoping that Skype would do something about that hideous new interface. But what did they do? Keep that same space wasting nightmare of a GUI and then add adverts to it just to make it even more annoying and difficult.

That's it for me. There are plenty of alternatives out there now and Skype has become hopeless.

Following nearly 100% negative reviews of the GUI ever since the early betas, I was holding out some hope that Skype might elect to listen to their user base and take some corrective action. I've been holding out on V2.8 and was hoping, really hoping that Skype would listen and do something about this monstrosity that passes for a user interface. But alas, no such luck.

Skype 5.2 is permanently in the bin for me, and judging from Skype's apparently policy to ignore their users' wishes, it will remain there. I may or may not be speaking for most of us, but I am really hoping that 2.8 continues to work.

I'm truly dumbfounded that after the universal negative criticism of the interface during beta testing, and the universal negative criticism of v5, Skype made no improvements to it and releases a v5.1. And the best solution they can come up with is to announce a contest for redesigning the chat window? Are they now admitting that they have no designers capable of coming up with a reasonable GUI?

Do the Skype designers even read reviews of their product? The entire GUI needs a complete overhaul, not just an attempt at making a new chat window alone. I'd be very happy if they simply reverted to V2.8 and added new features to that. Sadly, it looks like we are in for a very long wait to see any significant improvement to the interface. I have never seen such an incompetent group of designers for a major product who apparently pay zero attention to reviews from their customer base.

Our organisation is standardised on Skype for both Skype-Skype and IDD calls, using a Mac OSX standard. Sadly, it's not easy to completely transition to something other than Skype at this point, but following yesterday's release of 5.1, I received an email today from our IT guys asking us for suggestions on alternatives to Skype. We were asked to wait out v5 and see if Skype would listen to the comments regarding the GUI and make some changes, but obviously that hasn't happened. I would suggest that maybe our origanisation is not the only group looking at alternatives now.

As a final note, have a look at Skype's announcement of their chat window contest:

"When we first launched our new Mac app, we were delighted to see so many custom styles emerge from the design community, so we thought we’d make it official. Between now and the 14th April, we’re inviting you to design your own chat style for Skype for Mac"

Why do they think the custom styles are emerging? Hint: it's because users find Skype's default interface so unusable that users are trying to fix it themselves!

Other users here have already commented on the "interface from hell" that Skype came up with in this beta, so I'll just agree rather than restating. I found it completely unusable with my MacBook Air display, and just completely frustrating with my 24" iMac. I found myself thinking to myself "what were they thinking???" as I pondered the UI and tried to imagine the UI engineers at Skype.

I think this is one of the major revision betas I have ever removed, then downgraded, and that was the best use of my time all day when I got rid of Skype beta 5.0. Sorry, I can't comment on the stability problems other users have noted, since the UI was such a horrible experience that I ditched it before I really had a chance to test it much.