I'm still dreaming of a world where everyone uses IRC through an interface identical to Slack or Discord or whatever, and features like these are implemented.
I agree in principle, but IRC is a poor way to do this. I love IRC for it's simplicity, but that makes it hard to do more advanced features. It's a text-only protocol (other than DCC), so if you want to do something like allow users to click phone numbers to dial them then you have to regex it and hope for the best. Any kind of link is the same way. If you want to show images inline, you'll have to search for links, then either do another regex to see if the link is an image or prefetch the page to see if it's an image. Most servers still implement user authentication as a secondary service (i.e. it isn't part of the IRC server itself) afaik. I think the newer IRC specs include those, but support for it is missing in many servers.
Really a huge part of IRC's difficulty and beauty is in not having a markup language, but most of that beauty is for the eyes of the developer, not the user.
I like the concept of Matrix. That's kind of what they're trying to do by creating an open protocol, but when I looked at implementing a client it was non-trivial. For IRC, you can usually send someone a telnet log of you joining an IRC server and they could implement a client. I don't get the impression that that's true for Matrix.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20948530 is my attempt to demonstrate that implementing a Matrix client is almost as trivial as telnetting to port 6667 on an IRC server, fwiw :)
You might like irccloud; it's a web client (similar to slack) and bouncer, with support for image uploads, has a decent app, preserving history and I think it supports search too.
Not really a fan of the Slack or Discord user interface myself, but there are modern looking web clients for IRC such as thelounge[0] or kiwiirc[1] that might be what you are after.
