What is the Best IRC client?

[rabbit]

I'm sorry, but you fail.  mIRC is the worst.  XChat and irssi are far better.

I'm not quite sure how you can say that. Have you actually used mIRC? Its got the best chat interface of any program I have used to date. Not to mention a powerful and easy to use script language.

Yes, I have.  And I'm sorry, but I like to have C, Tcl, Ruby, Perl, and Python support over a lame scripting language made up by that guy that wrote mIRC.

[Skywing]

I've never actually looked into SILC. What is it, exactly? What benefits are there to using SILC over IRC?

I'm content with using IRC, and would/will probably switch if/when SILC gains some momentum and people start moving over to it.

It's designed for (cryptographic) security through the entire protocol.  Users can be positively identified via public key cryptography (assuming they choose to use the same public key while connecting) and all communications are encrypted with the server serving as a relay point after a key exchange with it (requiring that, like ssh, you can verify the server's public key).  There are also provisions (such as user to user or user to channel client to client encryption) to ensure that a compromised server or evil server operator cannot eavesdrop, if you choose to use those functions.

It's also, in general, a much better thought out protocol than IRC (among other things, not reliant on parsing human-readable text messages everywhere).  Unlike IRC over SSL, the security features aren't an afterthought bolt-on either.

The end user experience is fairly comparable to IRC.

[Joe]

I'm sorry, but you fail.  mIRC is the worst.  XChat and irssi are far better.

Most people (myself included) are too lazy to compile the binaries for Windows. :P

Unfortunately, this doesn't defeat your argument as most people are too lazy to try this either, but Googling "xchat free" gives you this.

[while1]

I use mIRC for Windows and XChat for Linux.  And for OSX, Colloquy (sp?) seems pretty nice, although I haven't used it extensively; just enough to show someone with a mac basic use of IRC and how it works.

[rabbit]

Again, XChat and irssi are better than anything, even on the Macincrap.