[zyxley]

> IRC is not broken. And the IRC clients work just fine for everyone.

...if they know what an IRC client is. Most people don't, and most people aren't going to bother installing and trying to configure some extra software just for a chat room on one weird website that won't get with the modern world and put in a web client.

[vertex-four]

Really? I'm looking across a number of special-interest and social channels right now, most having nothing to do with tech, and I can count one or two people in each who use a web client, despite the web client being linked from a popular web page for most.

I think that if you're going to have people using the web client with any sort of regularity, you really want to give up on IRC and implement something more modern. A new client isn't going to make it any more usable, nor add any new features that users can depend on.