Once upon time, the IRC was the Internet’s hottest scene. Its labyrinthine assortment of networks and channels attracted the most dedicated and interesting computer users around the globe into one massive community even as its strictly enforced etiquettes filtered out the clueless masses.
Those day are long past, as are the days of raucous newsgroups and open, botless chatrooms. There remain, however, small followings of hardcore users who cleave to medium as the last refuge of the old skool leet. They’re the geeks who swap old Phrack magazines despite the fact that they all own cellphones, the nerds who argue the merits of the various recipes found in the Anarchists Cookbook in a climate where discussing explosives publicly can get your front door kicked down, and the pirates who’ve been swapping files since before Napster. The last remnant of the crowd that lured the children of the eighties onto the web in the first place. Among these users, corners of IRC still flourish.
The main barrier to entering this intriguing world of geek culture is finding and learning to use an IRC client, such as mIRC. The development of IRC client has sputtered out, and the majority of clients still available are complicated, outdated, unintuitive, and frankly, ugly. That’s where Mibbit comes in.
Mibbit is a lightweight cross-platform IRC client that runs in PC browsers, as well as on the iPhone, Nokia N800, and yes, even the Wii. Its beautifully designed Ajax interface allows users to connect to any of the thousands of chat rooms across dozens of IRC servers without any downloads, without registering an account, and from behind virtually any firewall. And Mibbit isn’t just some slapdash substitute for users desperate to get their fix. Mibbit is jam-packed with features that make chatting in an IRC channel hassle-free.
The user interface of Mibbit organizes all of the usually overwhelming amounts of data involved in an IRC chat into a prim, style display. Users can open multiple networks, channels, and instant messaging accounts in separate tabs. Code and text can be shared using the built-in pastebin. Frequent users can even register to have all of their favorite channels launch automatically when they log into the service. Web masters can also use the a widget to embed an IRC chatroom on their a website.
Key features:
- Auto connect to your favorite channels after setup
- Auto image thumbnailing of image URLs
- Chat scroll-back on join that allows you to see some of the previous discussion
- Connect to multiple servers, multiple channels, and multiple Instant Messengers.
- Extended whois information featuring user profiles
- Full UTF-8 support for whatever language you use
- Input history for each channel
- Integrated pastebin for sharing code and text with other users
- On the fly language translation
- Tab completion for nicknames on Tab key
- Typing notification (Users name turns red when they are typing)
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