Khaled added support for displaying UTF-8 text as unicode to mIRC. This works in status, channel, query, and other windows, and in nickname listboxes, window titlebars, switchbar, and tooltips. The display of UTF-8 can be enabled by default for all windows in the Options/IRC/Messages dialog, or individually for any window you like via the Fonts dialog. Use the /font command to open the Fonts dialog. Make sure you select a font that contains the characters or script (hebrew, arabic, greek, cyrillic,...) you want to see!

The Fonts dialog also has an "Encode" option that encodes outgoing text in
UTF-8 based on the script/codepage selected for that window. The Encode feature is selective, ie. it only encodes the parts of an outgoing message that are not already in UTF-8 format. It also takes into account if the IRC server is fully UTF-8 enabled or not.

Various other 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

This new version has extended support for MP3 id3v2 tags, better invite and except lists, and heaps of other little thingies and identifiers like $findfilen/$finddirn, $qt(text)/$noqt(text), $locked and $mouse.key improvements. Of course also some UTF-8 related idfentifiers like $utfencode(), $utfdecode() and $isutf() have been added.