You might like to use /mode ....., but that doesn't mean popups shouldn't exist, other people might like them, with the same respect, you might like to count the number of ops, type /topic, etc, to get channel information, but others might not. As long as the statusbar would be able to be disabled, I really don't see why anyone should complain. Like I said, if you decide you like to type out everything and make work for yourself, thats fine, you can do as you please, but I see no reason why you should prevent the rest of us lazy people from having mIRC do the work for us, especially when it shouldn't really have any impact on you. If the statusbar were disabled by default, you wouldn't even know it was there.
<laziness_rant>
The primary purpose of computers was laziness. People didn't say "lets create machines that make more work for us!" they said "lets create machines that do our work for us and at the same time allow us to sit and play solitare while it does it!" Remember, the computer engineers aren't trying to work on ways to make it more difficult to interface with a computer, they are trying to make it eas... lazier. Right now the goal is speech recognition, but you can rest assured that 50-100 years down the road they'll be working on direct thought interfaces where you merely think about what you want the computer to do and it does it. Laziness is good, laziness is the thing that keeps computer programmers employed, I for one applaud laziness in all its forms and would love to see mIRC have the ability to make us as lazy as possible. People will often say that man is the "thinking animal" if you ask me, man is more accurately described as the "lazy animal" because we don't use our brain so much for the "common good" we use our knowledge to prevent us from having to do work, a characteristic unique to humans.
</laziness_rant>
