Display url with umlauts (öäü) / Show full IDN or Punycoded domains

threedog2

When you enter an url like https://www.unseriös.com for example, it gets diaplayed as https://www.xn--unseris-f1a.com

My (rather limited) understanding is, that the latter is like the 'real' url, because special characters are bad, but on Android Vivaldi displays the url with the ö, which helps readability. The second one just looks plain bad. So I don't see why the desktop version shouldn't display umlauts like äöü as well. (or ideally have a toggle to switch between which url style gets shown and a warning indicator if the url shown is not matching the real thing)

I am using the latest snapshot versions for windows and android.

If this topic is already talked about, or there is already a function for this, I am very sorry.

Kind regards and thanks.

(mod edit: improve title for searchability)

stardepp

URL's do not support umlauts.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16575923/html5-charset-utf-8-is-not-working-for-german-umlauts

A Former User

Please vote for IDN URL in Address Bar and History.

dsent

@potmeklecbohdan it seems that the topic is deleted, isn't it?

A Former User

@dsent Hmm, yes. The user was probably inactive for a long time & that request disappeared together with their account.

@Gwen-Dragon, could you please move this out of duplicates?

Hadden89

+1 for the request. The main reason why shouldn't be active by default is probably this.
(And a warning icon should be present when sites are rendered/written this way).

DevOpz

@stardepp said in Display url with umlauts (öäü):

URL's do not support umlauts.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/16575923/html5-charset-utf-8-is-not-working-for-german-umlauts

I have over 20 .com domains with special characters and the stackoverflow link you posted is about special characters in HTML, not URLs.

Hadden89

@threedog2 Could you make title more precise? It will be easier for other people who are searching for this request

LonM

@Hadden89 I updated the title, is that better?

dsent

Hi, I wonder if there are any news on this from the devs?

This seem ridiculous and extremely English-centric decision.

You avoid a security flaw (for English-speaking people) by introducing another security flaw (for everyone else).

Okay, yeah, now you can't be tricked by a site that sneaks a few Unicode characters into its otherwise English name. What about thousands and thousands of IDN sites, though?

It's now even easier to trick a person to use a wrong/scam site if it has an Unicode domain name. It's hard enough to tell the difference between госуслуги.рф and гозсуслуги.рф in a hurry. But how the hell am I supposed to differentiate xn--c1aapkosapc.xn--p1ai from xn--c1aalfnqvbqd.xn--p1ai? I'd say it's nearly impossible for a normal person.

So it's “protecting” the English speaking users at the expense of non-English speaking users' safety (and not following the standards all the major browsers comply to).

dsent

@Gwen-Dragon I understand that there is some rationale behind the decision, and it is not “let's discriminate against non-English speaking users.” However, the result is that non-English speaking users are, in fact, negatively affected by this decision in ways they are not affected by using any of the other major browsers.

dsent

@Gwen-Dragon I suspect we won't have a solution until there is at least one dev personally invested in the problem (i.e., a dev who uses Vivaldi and needs to access IDN sites often).

A Former User

@Gwen-Dragon IIRC Firefox (or was it another browser?) uses/used a whitelist for ETLDs for which they know they have a good policy, & checks/checked the rest for whether the domain is all in the same Unicode range. (They also noted in the article that this technique doesn’t prevent full-string confusables [relevant bug], but that’s too hard to avoid, innit?)

A Former User

@Gwen-Dragon Oh yes, this was probably what I meant. Thanks!

DoctorG

IDNA support has low priority for the small dev team.
And read why it is so complex to add secure display of such URLs: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack