1) Eventually.. mIRC usually has about one release per year, sometimes more. The last one was in November, so statistically speaking, there should be a release within the next few months.
2) Not within the next year at least. mIRC hasn't even started making changes to the underlying scripting engine which is *completely* unicode unaware, and the script support features far outnumber the UI features. It will be a gradual change, but for the most part Unicode should be at least *usable* by now.
