DMDirc, a free and open source IRC client written in Java, just announced the availability of a new version of their client.

This release, 0.6.3, introduces lots and lots of new features and improvements.

The DCC plugin has had a “particularly silly bug which rate limited all DCCs to 10KB/s in past versions” as well as a few other misc bugs.

Channel & URL links now work better since a few extra characters are now parsed correctly which would’ve broken them before.

A topic bar has been added which lets you view and edit it easily – topic history handling has been improved as well.

The plugin browser which has been introduced with the previous release now actually works (yay! ) and lets you “browse through plugins, themes and action packs from within DMDirc, and download and install them with one click”.

Aside from that, developer Chris announces that at the same time they end their support for their Subversion repository as they’ve migrated everything – including their build scripts – to Git now.

The download can be obtained from here and the pretty extensive changelog can be viewed here.