IRC isn’t as popular nowadays, but every once in a while I have a reason to use it. I’ve used xChat on Linux but on Windows I didn’t know of a free IRC client. I Googled around but found only commercial applications.

Then I found one right under my nose. Literally.

I was using Opera to search Google for a client and discovered that Opera has a built in IRC client. Yes, in the 4.64MB download, not only do they have the most standards compliant web browser, a full-featured mail client and a bittorrent client, they also have an IRC client. Impressive.

If you don’t want to use Opera’s IRC client I also realized that you can use Gaim (6.64MB not including the separate GTK runtime environment download) which is an instant messaging client for all the popular services like AOL, Yahoo, MSN that also has IRC support.