Well, meaningless that petition was or not, it doesn't matter. But it seems that many people really NEED Unicode support: people who are communicating in more than one non-English language. Although speak 4 languages which have overlapping character sets (meaning I would have to switch Windows settings and reboot in order to communicate in another language), I'm not exactly one of those people because I don't IRC much (hint: MSN has unicode ;-)). But I happen to know a bunch of people who need to IRC in both Estonian and Russian (those languages have different overlapping character sets). X-chat is a decent client for them but it doesn't flash taskbar. And people running Windows who need both features at the same time, they are simply out of options.
