Internationalized domain names in the root

Thu May 6 18:45:36 UTC 2010

On 5 May 2010, at 2:16 PM, Jorge Amodio wrote:
> On Wed, May 5, 2010 at 11:34 AM, David Conrad <drc at virtualized.org> wrote:
>> Perhaps a bit off-topic, but some folks might get support calls...
>> 
>> http://وزارة-الأتصالات.مصر/
>> 
>> (that's Arabic for <Ministry of Communications>.<Egypt>)
> 
> Great progress and interesting addition to the root, only issue is
> that after all the work with IDNs you land on a page written in
> english (web browser lang does not matter, name resolves to the same
> IP as the original URL). Hope they soon take advantage of the new name

The page shows up in Arabic for me in all three of Safari (in which the URL bar also shows the Arabic name), Chrome and Firefox (in both of which the URL bar shows the encoded US-ASCII characters for the domain name). I tested using the Mac versions of these three browsers, and English is set as my preferred language. Arabic doesn't appear until much farther down on the list.

The Safari experience looks nicer, but I suppose it leaves its users more susceptible to maliciously-constructed domain names that look similar to well-known ones. I wonder if they've addressed that issue in some way. I haven't been checking recently.

- Geoff