Is there a free, actively developed IRC client for Snow Leopard?

So far I've been able to find only outdated clients, which are either abandoned years ago or they are currently developed but only for newer systems, or commercial.

Is there a free¹ client actively developed for Snow Leopard?

¹ Free "as in beer", though, of course, I'd prefer if it was also "as in speech".

Solution 1:

Try Adium, which has IRC support and a lot more all free and its still under active development. Also it supports Snow Leopard on the current 1.5.3 version, as long as your up to at least OS X 10.6.8.

Supported services

• XMPP ("Jabber"), including

  • Google Talk

  • LJ (LiveJournal) Talk

  • Facebook Chat

  • Gizmo5

• MSN Messenger

• AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), including

  • MobileMe (formerly known as .Mac)

• Yahoo! Messenger, including

  • Yahoo! Japan Messenger

• ICQ

• Bonjour, compatible with iChat

• Twitter

• IRC

• MySpaceIM

• Gadu-Gadu

• IBM Lotus Sametime

• Novell GroupWise

Solution 2:

I use and quite like LimeChat. Free as in beer and free as in speech. The latest release was 2.32 (2012.07.30) -- so it's getting actively developed. I was running it on Snow Leopard just fine. As well as Lion and now Mountain Lion. Snow Leopard is the minimum OS requirement for it.

As for the regular update request: Snow Leopard is getting on in age now. It's two minor versions behind Mountain Lion. Expect that development for this platform is going to taper off severely at this point in time. That's just how it goes. In the case of LimeChat, the 2.30 release support Snow Leopard and it got an update in January 2012. That's hardly a dead and abandoned code line.

Solution 3:

Colloquy (http://colloquy.info/downloads.html) is actively developed, though not for Snow Leopard. There is an old version still available for 10.6. It's the only IRC client I've used for any length of time and it seems to do its job fairly well, though it certainly has some quirks.