Some of these are already in place, eg. IRCCloud can render simple markdown, supports push notifications, can show inline images, supports display pictures, Slack-like threads, emojis, etc...
Hopefully longer term we won't need to use IRCCloud/a bouncer to keep chat history. AFAIK an IRCv3 server should be able to offer that natively (to an IRCv3 client).
As for unencrypted TCP... a lot of IRC networks seem to offer TLS these days.
Not saying this is perfect -- far from it, but people are working on improving IRC!
Some of these are already in place, eg. IRCCloud can render simple markdown, supports push notifications, can show inline images, supports display pictures, Slack-like threads, emojis, etc...
An example: https://twitter.com/IRCCloud/status/971416931373854721
Hopefully longer term we won't need to use IRCCloud/a bouncer to keep chat history. AFAIK an IRCv3 server should be able to offer that natively (to an IRCv3 client).
As for unencrypted TCP... a lot of IRC networks seem to offer TLS these days.
Not saying this is perfect -- far from it, but people are working on improving IRC!