It’s not a Komodo or php.ini issue. By default Mozilla try to use CP1251 if you don’t set <meta charset>. Try to insert <meta charset=utf-8> before <?php tag.
Just for testing you can try to use UTF-8 in any html file without <meta charset> and open it in browser like a site (not file://), open a developer console (Ctrl+Shift+K) and in console you can find a warning about using UTF-8 without setting a default charset for browser.
Well done.
As I see at now Firefox (and forks) can detect Russian language and change encoding from CP1251 to UTF-8, nice. And I think auto-detection of Russian appeared in the Firefox 30+, but Komodo 8 uses Mozilla 24 as far as I remember.
I’m check this in Komodo 9.
There is same problem in IDE9. You must use <meta charset> to property Cyrillic displaying.