Recommended IRC Clients - Needing help on it

[HrtOfSword]

I just recently discovered that mIRC is actually one of the many Internet Relay Chat clients around instead of being the originator of IRC. (Just like the time when I found out that BitTorrent was one of the many BitTorrent clients available, and there were better alternatives like Azureus, now Vuze.)
So right now, I'd like to find out if there are other recommened IRC clients around that are comparable or better than the mIRC because the lame startup menu that requires you to click TWICE and wait for THREE minutes or so is getting on my nerves.

That menu (in older versions of mIRC) used to go away with one click and the waiting time was rather short, so it was still ok. But making it troublesome and time-consuming just made it go past my limit.
It's like the PDFCreator gone bad... zzz (PDFCreator after ver0.9.6 now has rubbish-ware included)

Besides an alternative to mIRC, does anyone know which is the latest OLD version of mIRC, in which the option to click "skip" appears within 3 seconds and the menu goes away after one click?

[relic2279]

I use the chatzilla plugin for firefox. It's not very versatile, especially if you want to run scripts or DCC type things, but I just use it for chat. It also accepts Japanese character input which I have yet to be able to get mIRC to do.

There is also Xchat, which people seem to like, but I believe that isn't free so might have to look for it in the bay of pirates, as it were.

[kureshii]

Irssi.

[Xiong Chiamiov]

You'll find a list of our recommended irc clients on the wiki.  Most people seem to use mirc, xchat or irssi.

There is also Xchat, which people seem to like, but I believe that isn't free so might have to look for it in the bay of pirates, as it were.

XChat is, in fact, free; the author just requires you to pay him for precompiled Windows versions.  There are other people who will do so for free, although they may be a few versions behind.

[dubkats]

EPIC
BitchX
Konversation

[Kuroshima]

Irssi and xchat +1
opera also comes with irc client. Useful if you want to keep everything integrated. Supports xdcc.

[Lupin]

I use the chatzilla plugin for firefox. It's not very versatile, especially if you want to run scripts or DCC type things, but I just use it for chat. It also accepts Japanese character input which I have yet to be able to get mIRC to do.

The problem with chatzilla is that it's banned in the largest distro channel in Rizon.

[relic2279]

The problem with chatzilla is that it's banned in the largest distro channel in Rizon.

Ah. I was an IRC fiend back in the 90's (#exceed on efnet for nostalgia, if anyone remembers), but now I only use the IRC to chat in #askreddit on freenode.net. I don't do much downloading from the IRC anymore...

[temuchin]

i have used mirc on a windows xp machine in the past.  it worked well, i suppose.

i am curious if anyone can recommend a stable client for the Mac?

[Kuroshima]

Colloquy right?
I don't use it but I believe that is one of the more popular ones for mac....

[Blanchimont]

Nettalk

I myself use xchat (used kvirc previously, but that lacked some features like support for files >4GB and filenames weren't even allowed to have spaces in them...) but I've heard lot of praise for Nettalk.
Aside from mirc, it's one of the few clients which doesn't have any problems with huge filesizes (even xchat has some glitches, like when resuming very large files...). And the looks seem nice (having used kvirc, xchat looked like hellspawn...)

Unfortunately some features/documentation of it remain untranslated to english (originally a german client) and the latest version still lacks support for SSL and IPv6, and it's for Windows only.

On the plusside is that it's open source (Apache License 2.0)