Hmm ok. So Google just had something in between that presented as XMPP to pidgin? Google's original chat was open so it was easy to connect to. I know that presented as XMPP because I still have the old account on my system (yeah I'm really bad about deleting stuff that no longer works). Then a few years ago Google decided to put their chat behind Oauth2 authentication, which required a specialized pidgin plugin and a bit of manual setup to get it to work. Those are the two versions of Google chat I've worked with. Before that I was using Yahoo chat, but we all know what a joke Verizon made of that.

So during this time I would log in to the same account both from home and from work. I think you might be right though, that all new messages only appeared on the latest machine to log in. And that appears to still be the case using Openfire.

After Google updated their chat, when I got in to work the new setup sent a copy of all the messages I hadn't already seen on that client since the last time I signed in, so there was always a full history. Again this setup used an XMPP account in Pidgin, but it's certainly possible that the plugin which worked with the Oauth2 authentication provided some new features to pull the history down? The odd thing was that some of my chat during the day would show up on my computer at home, but not all of the messages, and I never really understood what the difference was.

Regardless, is there a newer XMPP client you might recommend which is somewhat similar to pidgin's look&feel, but actually provides a history when connecting from multiple machines? It would certainly be nice if all messages from myself and the people I spoke to were shown on both machines while they are simultaneously signed in, but I can make do without that. However I really do need the history to show up when I sign in to the next machine, and I'm hoping at some point to also get a client set up on my phone (gotta join that 21st century at some point!).