Developed by Eion Robb, the Skype4Pidgin developer, SkypeWeb Plugin for Pidgin has a major advantage over the old Skype4Pidgin plugin: it doesn’t require Skype to run in the background. According to its GitHub page, the plugin supports Live email address logins (as well as regular logins), group chat, file transfers, and allows setting “mood” messages. Unfortunately I couldn’t find a complete list of features.