Does Bitcoin still use the IRC channel? I recently read an article on Bitcoin Media, that claimed:


  Jeff Garzik pointed out that Bitcoin-Qt no longer operates using the IRC bootstrap, and on inspection he’s right. This mainly applies to older versions of bitcoin.


Implying that the IRC channel is no longer used by Bitcoin-QT. Is this true, and if so, which version of the standard Bitcoin client was the first not to use the IRC channel?
The IRC bootstrapping method is deprecated and default off since the 0.6 release. It's still implemented and can be enabled using the -irc command line option.

The function of the IRC bootstrapping system will get replaced by DNS seeding and peer exchange, however.