Netcraft reports that the Mozilla Organization is planning to disable International Domain Names (IDN) in the default configurations of the Firefox and Mozilla browsers, in an effort to limit the effectiveness of phishing attacks that might exploit the recently publicized flaw in IDN.

Last week I posted a comment about this, and what I thought at the time was a valid workaround for disabling IDN. Setting enableIDN to false it isn’t effective on all Firefox browsers; the nightly build code has fixed this. When I tested the browser on my notebook, it failed Secunia’s spoof test. According to the MozillaZine forum thread about the IDN issue, you can also disable IDN by commenting out all references to IDN in your compreg.dat file. This worked for me.

[Link to an extension to disable IDN removed, see later post.]