ie6 rerouting idn traffic to ascii equivalents

[mj]

I just confirmed it from an internet cafe in greece. Pasting kilpisjärvi.com into ie6 and hitting enter takes me to kilpisjarvi.com.

IE version : 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_2_rtm.040803-2158

IMO, this is not necessarily bad news because we are still not seeing the entirety of type-in traffic. When large corporations finally make the move to ie7, watch out... They will only be able to hold out for a max of 1 more year IMO.

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[touchring]

this also happens with ie7 in some cases.

[mj]

Update: typing a greek dot com sends me to an msn live search...

υποτιτλοι.com -> http://search.live.com/results.aspx?...e%bf%ce%b9.com

Now we just need to figure out how to get ie6 out of internet cafes. I would think that they would prefer firefox anyway due to security issues, but it doesn't seem to be the case in the 2 cafes I have visited so far in Greece.

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[Drewbert]

ie6 does not know how to handle UNICODE in a domain name, so my guess is that there is a plug-in on that computer doing something?

[mj]

Originally Posted by Drewbert

ie6 does not know how to handle UNICODE in a domain name, so my guess is that there is a plug-in on that computer doing something?

Not sure as I had very limited access. It was just weird that on a greek windows xp setup, finnish gets converted to it's ascii equivalent and greek just goes to msn live search.

I wonder what the name of this "plugin" is and how widely it's deployed.

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[mj]

Does IE6 ever behave the same way when typing in an IDN?

I just tried typing in kilpisjärvi.com with IE6 from a machine in Finland and guess what? It does a google search for:

http://www.google.com/search?q=kilpisj%c3%a4rvi.com


IE6 version: 6.0.2900.2180.xpsp_sp2_gdr.070227-2254


In Greece, it took me to kilpisjarvi.com! Any theories? I am no windows expert... I don't even use the damned thing unless I am forced to.

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