ya know, i'm tired of the question marks

so a long time ago, when i used ie, the first time i visited a site that had japanese/chinese characters, it prompted me to download some ime thingy that allowed me to view the characters. when i started to use firefox last year, i found the link that will allow me to view the characters. now i'm just lost. please help, i'd rather view the characters than the ????????? ????????????????  ???????????????????  ????????

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/downloads/recommended/ime/default.mspx

Make sure you've got East Asian support installed (check the "Install files for East Asian languages checkbox on the Languages tab in the Regional and Language Options dialog). If it has to install these files, it may request your Windows CD. Then make sure Firefox is set to display unicode characters (View > Character Encoding > Unicode (UTF-8)).