615512 - Conversion in URLs from ß to ss not advisable any more.

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 479520

(Firefox :: General, defect)

Description

[markus]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; de; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101122 Firefox/3.6.13
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; de; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101122 Firefox/3.6.13

Since some weeks it is possible to get German .de domains [1] containing the letter ß [2]. Firefox until now translates ß in the domain to ss and might lead you to a wrong page, if the owner of the domain did not register both versions.

[1] http://www.denic.de/en/denic-in-dialogue/press-releases/press/2981.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eszet

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Surf to http://groß.de
2. You end up at http://gross.de
Actual Results:  
You might end up at the wrong page.

Expected Results:  
groß.de and gross.de are not the same and might be bought by different people

punycode [1] is a work around, but that doesn't help the average user

other Mozilla products might suffer the same problem

this whole thing might be used for phishing etc.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punycode