as for irc, well, that's best experienced in command line, and by the way, a finnish invention with any skills, one could get SCROLLZ source code and compile it with developer tools; the final product is a single file that can be executed from terminal, and in my opinion, is the best irc client ever seen the daylight. but it's a cli app, so not everyone likes it.
edit: the source code can be downloaded from www.scrollz.com