Firefox 2.0 and IDN
The latest version of the increasingly popular browser will include new features like a phishing finder to warn people of questionable sites, a spell checker and a session restoration system that allows one to restore an accidently closed tabbed webpage or info lost in a crash.Firefox has long supported Internationalized Domain Names (IDNs). Last year, due to spoofing and phishing concerns, Firefox disabled default native character IDN resolution, opting instead to only display IDNs in Punycode.
Now Firefox resolves IDN domains to native character form only if the registry of the domain’s TLD has posted a policy on what characters it permits and how it handles homographs - similar looking characters from different character sets or scripts. Mozilla, the organization behind Firefox, maintains an IDN TLD whitelist which lists the domain extensions that will resolve in native character form in Firefox. It appears so far that .com and .net are not on the list so these will resolve to Punycode.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 14th, 2006 at 8:10 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
