With this release we of course address most of the comments and remarks we received after the release of the previous mIRC version. Khaled added support for displaying UTF-8 text as unicode to mIRC. mIRC can also encode outgoing text in UTF-8, based on the script/codepage you selected. Among the various other changes are a better check for timed out connections, support for passive dcc send/chat connections, resizable file dialogs, lots of SSL related improvements and various additions of "dangerous" commands to the Lock options dialog.

Over 160 changes have been made to mIRC. You'll have to dig through the help file in mIRC and the whatsnew.txt on the Web to learn about the complete list of changes and their impact. Some changes are obvious, some need getting used to - please take your time to play with them and see how they work?

Here is a list of a few changes:

mIRC now has a 'check for timed out connections' option in connect/options dialog. When this
is set mIRC pings the server every so often if it hasn't heard form the server for a while to test your
connection.
Support for initiating passive dcc send/chat connections has been added.
Changing the default font for a window type now affects all open windows of the same type immediately.
Most file dialogs are now resizable.
You can disable the $decode identifier (and various other "dangerous" commands) in the Lock options
dialog. (The $decode is of course disabled by default.)
Lots of SSL things have improved and mIRC now also supports SSL connections for sockets

The rest of the change log can be found here.

Source - www.mirc.com