Hacker News Reader

Comment by thorax | Hacker News Reader

Chrome and Firefox both work for it fine. I use Windows actually.

Are you clicking them from a feed reader? Or from the Hacker News page? What kind of error do you get?

Sometimes feed readers or the like urlencode the domain name and it confuses IDN resolvers in browsers.

If it's not working directly from http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=498051 can you tell me what version of Chrome and Firefox you're using?

Thanks in advance!

View on HN

It doesn't work at all for me in Firefox 3 on Windows. I get the same response after clicking on all links (feed reader, HN frontpage, this page):

  Page Load Error
  Address Not Found
  Firefox can't find the server at www.➡.ws.

This is the same trouble as with Unicode snowman domain.

In one discussion here on HN I figured out it's probably because of some security measure to prevent phishing. There are some Unicode characters that look like normal ASCII letters (for example in Cyrillic alphabet), so if Unicode worked in urls, you could create malicious sites that would look like real ones:

http://EXAMPLE-ВANK.COM (fake)

http://EXAMPLE-BANK.COM (real)

What version/build of Firefox do you have? Firefox/3.0.6?

Also, check your about:config and filter by IDN, you should see a lot of settings there. Any of them not set to default?

Especially check this one: network.enableIDN

by default it is set to True.

What other Firefox addons do you have that might be parsing URLs before you visit them? Any?

Thanks a lot for the feedback!

Firefox 3.0.6

  network.enableIDN;false (user set)

Addons that can modify urls:

  NoScript, AdBlock Plus

I guess it's probably NoScript that disabled IDN (internationalized domain names). I don't remember doing it manually.

I also experience problems.

Microsoft Windows 5.1 (Build 2600.xpsp_sp3_gdr.080814-1236: Service Pack 3)

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.19 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/1.0.154.48 Safari/525.19

Reading from the front page of Hacker News. The links work but all of the fancy pants unicode stuff shows up as square boxes. This was also a problem when http://unicodesnowmanforyou.com/ was making the rounds.

I'm almost certain it's just a font issue since the Unicode Snowman takes advantage of a font embedding feature specific to IE (and works properly there). I'm not sure anything can be done about this, short of pushing browsers to install fonts.

Ah, may be a problem with Chrome 1.0 they're going to fix soon?

It works fine in my Chrome:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/530.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/2.0.166.1 Safari/530.1

I'll have to see if I can install the original Chrome 1.0 on another machine and check it out, too.

Thanks a lot for the feedback.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com