Firefox 1.0.1

Firefox 1.0.1 is out with some security fixes. Internationalized domain names like www.bär.de or www.bücher.de – the German words for “bear” and “books” – will work, but are instantly rewritten to “Punycode”. This means www.bär.de turns to “http://www.xn--br-via.de/” in the browser address bar. The reason behind this apparently is to prevent phishing attacks, which could fool users by leading them to URLs which look like “paypal.com” but actually contain a cyrillic “a.” (Google, by the way, does understand special characters in domains, which you can see by entering “site:www.bär.de”.)

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