I have been following the discussions on this topic on the Mozilla/Chrome development blogs/bugtrackers. The solutions they are implementing are similar to but not identical to the OpenSSL solution. Unfortunately, it looks like they are seeing compatibility issues with some SSL servers, just like the OpenSSL solution, so we will need to see what solution they finally settle on.
In any case, it looks like the BEAST exploit only applies to web browsers in a very specific context, so it does not seem to be applicable to secure IRC connections. That said, I will start testing mIRC with the SSL_OP_ALL removed and will release a public beta at some point for wider testing to ensure that this change doesn't have any other side-effects.
