Mibbit

Mibbit is a new IRC client that — wait, they still make IRC clients? While AOL, MSN, Google, Skype and others dominate the world chat scene these days, once upon a time IRC or Internet Relay Chat was king. And while IRC doesn’t get much attention these days, it’s still alive, kicking, and useful if you need a multi-user chat system for communicating with co-workers, open source project developers, or anonymous folks you might want to trade files with.

So what makes Mibbit different from old school IRC clients? It’s web-based, which means you can run it from anywhere. But despite the fact that you can run Mibbit from your web browser, you get all of the features you’d expect from a desktop based IRC client, and then some.

There’s a search engine that lets you find channels by keyword. You can change the color scheme, and even use a built in translator to communicate with users in different languages. Each new channel or server screen opens in a new Mibbit tab, and if you’re running Mibbit in a tabbed browser, you’ll get cute little alerts like “Server stuff!” or “People said stuff!”

There’s even a Mibbit widget that you can install on your web site to let visitors chat with you via IRC.

[via DownloadSquad]