Unicode domain support in browsers

Date: 10 May 2015
Author: Erik Dubbelboer

According to RFC 3492 Unicode domains are encoded using Punycode. So http://日本語.jp is actually http://xn–wgv71a119e.jp

I was interested in when browsers would use Unicode and when they would use Punycode. Here are the results of my tests:

browser location bar location.href dom referrer http referrer
firefox 36 Unicode Unicode ASCII ASCII
safari 8.0.3 Unicode ASCII ASCII ASCII
chrome 41 ASCII ASCII ASCII ASCII
IE 9 Unicode Unicode Unicode ASCII
IE 11 Unicode Unicode Unicode ASCII
opera 12 Unicode Unicode Unicode ASCII
opera 28 ASCII ASCII ASCII ASCII
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