Chinese gamers, rejoice over .游戏 (“.games”)
The new gTLDs are here, and unfortunately they are all IDNs – not the best way to introduce millions of doubting Thomases to the new era of the Internet.
IDN domains are a special species and require proper handling of the international characters by the browser.
It seems that not all web browsers are ready to handle them.
Already in the root zone servers, the new Chinese IDN gTLD .游戏 which stands for “games”, does not render properly.
For example, when NIC.游戏 is entered in Safari, Chrome, or Internet Explorer 10 in Windows, the URL forwards to the punycode equivalent, nic.xn--unup4y.
Matters are even worse with Opera, which claims to be the world’s fastest web browser, as the URL points to Google.com/NIC.游戏 when typed without the “http://” prefix. When the prefix is included, the URL shifts to its punycode destination.
Overall, we aren’t confident that the browser makers were exactly prepared for the transition. Only Firefox seems to do the job properly, without a transition to punycode!
This post is 100% true!
I tried 儿童.游戏 (children.game) using Firefox but “Server not found” was returned.
Kassey – The gTLD is in the root servers, but there are no domains other than the ones registered by the registry. Try donuts.游戏