Is Chrome good or bad for domainers?

[mj]

It has the built-in ability to hijack type-in traffic, but will Google really use it against domainers?

.

[nikel]

Ok I'm going to write this in an annoying-blogger-debunking-myths style, with some not so perfect english inside:

Myth 1: Chrome doesn't whitelist ANY languages by default.

True only when you download the English version. Anyone tried downloading Chrome in, say, Russian?
Russian IS whitelisted by default when you download Chrome in Russian. Russian IDN domains work like a breeze, shiny unicode and all! No punycode when you visit Russian IDNs!

Tested with: Hebrew, Russian, Bulgarian

There is even a distinction between the cyrillic languages - when you've installed only Bulgarian, the Russian IDNs containing ы would be shown as punycode.

Myth 2: You can't add more than 1 language in Chrome or/and when another language is added this doesn't reflect the resolving of punycode to unicode.

Tried and working. All added languages become instantly whitelisted. You don't even have to generally switch to Unicode.
Just try it!

Originally Posted by Chrome Code

// |languages| is a comma separated list of ISO 639 language codes. It
// is used to determine whether a hostname is 'comprehensible' to a user
// who understands languages listed. |host| will be converted to a
// human-readable form (Unicode) ONLY when each component of |host| is
// regarded as 'comprehensible'. Scipt-mixing is not allowed except that
// Latin letters in the ASCII range can be mixed with a limited set of
// script-language pairs (currently Han, Kana and Hangul for zh,ja and ko).
// When |languages| is empty, even that mixing is not allowed.

Myth 3: MS and Mozilla don't give a shit about IDNs, and Google is no different.

The Chrome team or Google or whatever seems to have a distinctive approach to the IDNs, unlike the other popular browsers who really doesn't seem to care much.

There's a distinction between Macedonian, Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian. Probably amongst the other languages which have a shared alphabet too.

That shows that they didn't just slapped some half-assed code.

While testing the different installs of Chrome I noticed that google.com/chrome tries to deliver the localized version of Chrome, looking up your IP, browser settings (I guess) and the settings in your google account.

So everyone who goes to download Chrome would get the version in his/her own local language automatically and thus would be able to open the IDNs in his/her own language without seeing any punycode.

...

When you first type some keyword in the so called omnibox, the first suggestion is to search google with the entered keyword.

The second suggestion looks like "яд/".

If you choose this you land on some Chrome DNS error page where Chrome suggest you to visit... xn--d1a7c.su
Type ник, choose ник/ and the suggestion is xn--h1auh.su which actually means хит.su - this must be some sort of a bug
Type турция, choose турция/ suggestion is xn--h1apfeq9c.com which goes to Турция.com
Россия? Chrome suggest to go to россия.net.

I have no idea how this works but it does seem to prefer developed IDNs with some good google rankings from what I've seen.

Can anyone confirm this?

...

Once you've visited some IDN and type the same keyword in the omnibox - the full IDN with the extension comes as a first suggestion, in bold.

My opinion as a whole?
You can't get more IDN-friendly than that, especially in the first public release.

Domainer-friendly?
I have no idea if Chrome is going to decrease type-in traffic with the way it works now or it will help increase it. Time and stats will show.

However, with compounds the only suggestions are to search with google, and direct link to relevant sites. Can't get to the DNS error box.

[yanni]

Thanks for the info.

When you type in a keword and hit enter, what happens?

[mj]

I downloaded Chrome from Finland, but my browser was set to English, so I guess I got the "american" version of Chrome and didn't have Finnish as a whitelisted language by default.

Interesting information you gave about this, though.

.

[261275]

Thanks for that info.

Originally Posted by nikel

Ok I'm going to write this in an annoying-blogger-debunking-myths style, with some not so perfect english inside:

Myth 1: Chrome doesn't whitelist ANY languages by default.

True only when you download the English version. Anyone tried downloading Chrome in, say, Russian?
Russian IS whitelisted by default when you download Chrome in Russian. Russian IDN domains work like a breeze, shiny unicode and all! No punycode when you visit Russian IDNs!

Tested with: Hebrew, Russian, Bulgarian

There is even a distinction between the cyrillic languages - when you've installed only Bulgarian, the Russian IDNs containing ы would be shown as punycode.

Myth 2: You can't add more than 1 language in Chrome or/and when another language is added this doesn't reflect the resolving of punycode to unicode.

Tried and working. All added languages become instantly whitelisted. You don't even have to generally switch to Unicode.
Just try it!



Myth 3: MS and Mozilla don't give a shit about IDNs, and Google is no different.

The Chrome team or Google or whatever seems to have a distinctive approach to the IDNs, unlike the other popular browsers who really doesn't seem to care much.

There's a distinction between Macedonian, Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian. Probably amongst the other languages which have a shared alphabet too.

That shows that they didn't just slapped some half-assed code.

While testing the different installs of Chrome I noticed that google.com/chrome tries to deliver the localized version of Chrome, looking up your IP, browser settings (I guess) and the settings in your google account.

So everyone who goes to download Chrome would get the version in his/her own local language automatically and thus would be able to open the IDNs in his/her own language without seeing any punycode.

...

When you first type some keyword in the so called omnibox, the first suggestion is to search google with the entered keyword.

The second suggestion looks like "яд/".

If you choose this you land on some Chrome DNS error page where Chrome suggest you to visit... xn--d1a7c.su
Type ник, choose ник/ and the suggestion is xn--h1auh.su which actually means хит.su - this must be some sort of a bug
Type турция, choose турция/ suggestion is xn--h1apfeq9c.com which goes to Турция.com
Россия? Chrome suggest to go to россия.net.

I have no idea how this works but it does seem to prefer developed IDNs with some good google rankings from what I've seen.

Can anyone confirm this?

...

Once you've visited some IDN and type the same keyword in the omnibox - the full IDN with the extension comes as a first suggestion, in bold.

My opinion as a whole?
You can't get more IDN-friendly than that, especially in the first public release.

Domainer-friendly?
I have no idea if Chrome is going to decrease type-in traffic with the way it works now or it will help increase it. Time and stats will show.

However, with compounds the only suggestions are to search with google, and direct link to relevant sites. Can't get to the DNS error box.

[alexd]

Definately one of the most interesting posts I have read on any forums about Google Chrome.

Thanks for that.

Alex

[michael]

Originally Posted by alexd

Definately one of the most interesting posts I have read on any forums about Google Chrome.

Thanks for that.

Alex

Because it's not just about Chrome, it is about Chrome+IDNs And I am wondering about traffic on those IDN.su domains now)))