Yesterday, Plugin Central has been updated to include version 1.5 of the IRC plugin. Due to quick development and release cycles, version 1.6 is already complete.

For those of you who don't have CVS or do not want to get the current version and compile it yourself, you can grab a pre-compiled version of the IRC plugin at the IQ Computing web site. To install it, just replace your existing IRC.jar in jEdit's "jars" directory with the new Jar file.

The situation differs among the major browsers. Internet Explorer, even as recently as version 6.0, will work with self-signed certificates under Microsoft's JVM. However, Netscape, Mozilla and other browsers using Sun's Java Plugin-In have stricter security requirements. Beginning with JDK 1.3.1, a security certificate will not work without a valid root Certificate Authority. It appears there is no way to circumvent this requirement, even if the user were willing to run an untrusted applet plugin. Since an IRC applet on the jEdit Community site would have to access the Internet to communicate with an IRC server, security limitations are triggered.