IE <5.5 vs IE >=5.5 statistics? (Should we use UTF-8?)

Hello, respected web authors! This is my first posting to this NG, and I hope for
your help!

Q: It is rumored that IE < 5.5 are broken when dysplaying UTF-8
encoded pages. Haven't seen that myself but I've heard that with
UTF-8 encoded pages IE 5.0 disregards all the informatino on
fonts from css files, style attributes and <font> tags and chooses
fonts on its own. Except for distortion in site design it is reported
that for for example Japanese text it picks up a samll and ugly
font. It is reported sometimes that not all the characters in
scripts like Japanese are displayed. In short, the reports say
IE < 5.5 is broken with UTF-8 pages.

Then it becomes very important to us to have statistics, how much
IE 5.0 are still operating out there? (IE 4.0 I believe may be
disregarded already, it seem for some reason that the majority
of people have get rid of 4.0, but it seems to its not true for 5.0)
Am I right? I bielive the only answer to this would be separate
statistics on IE 5.0 + 5.1 and on IE 5.5 + IE 6.0.

After all this is a question of whether we may already widely use
UTF-8 for international web pages (that probably contain a mixture
of scripts) or we should hold back for another 2 years and wait for
the IE 5.0/5.1 to come out of operation.

Yes, I know NN < 6 is also broken with UTF-8 (for cyrillics for
example it fails to input text in forms correctly), but statistics
on NN 4 is available.

Very hoping someone may give some usefull links for this,
my best regards,  Anton Tagunov

Post graduate student at Moscow State Univesity

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