Well if the other clients decide to not support the feature, then that's their fault. Giving reasonable notice of a feature that will be included, and trying to work on a joint/unified solution so that all can benefit from it is a good approach, and if the other clients refuse to support it, then if it's something that becomes overly popular, they will start losing popularity while mIRC simply increases in it. To be honest, with the exception of javas (which are iffy, at beast), pirch (eh, ok I guess) and obviously mIRC, I don't know of any other clients. It's to my knowledge that mIRC is by far the most used non-java client. (But add in javas on the net, and the comparison changes greatly). I know there are others out there, and probably some very competitive to mIRC, but I haven't really looked, because mIRC keeps me happy.
