Irc clients are faster and more featured than web apps.

Also, you can have bots.

There is a client library that makes it easy to write JabbR bots in .NET/Mono:

https://github.com/davidfowl/JabbR.Client

'faster' is subjective.

There really isn't much IRC does that you can't do with JabbR.

There's bots in JabbR too