Yah I really hate the differences in the American to British English spellings, drive me nuts. It's like they want to randomly toss silent useless U's into a lot of words where it is not needed, and then in some cases blatantly mis-spell a word like center or shop by flipping letters or adding more like it's cute or something. Never made a bit of sense to me other than just knowing it's hold out old english tripe from a long dead era that just won't go away.
Someone the other day went over an article on wikipedia changing all the words in there to have U's in them on the American site for a dog breed. I went in and used a replace function to put it back to normal and cited the fix as 'english site for consistency uses american english.'