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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Windows Store has been surprisingly fragile for me. I've bought a couple of games through it and things like turning off IPv6 will cause it to fail to download anything and spit out cryptic error codes.

But mostly I don't want my games spread across a dozen different storefronts. Keeping them all in once place is more convenient. I would probably be more open to the Windows Store if I owned an XBox and there was some kind of integration, but I don't.

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Steam is doing even worse with IPv6 support – in fact they have absolutely none (although their CDN provider has great support for it). Really a shame that they're missing such an useful piece of functionality in this day and age. This of course has made me consider some of the alternatives...

Unfortunately the only Steam alternatives that have some amount of IPv6 support are Humble Bundle and Green Man Gaming. Though you may as well not count Humble Bundle as accessing their website over IPv6 results in it being completely broken [1].

[1] https://vgy.me/0E4HBm.png

I'm curious -- why would IPv6 access for a website be an important matter?

It's faster, it's cheaper, it's easier to setup and use. As of now not everyone always has IPv4 access anymore. I conciously avoid purchasing products that have no IPv6 support, as I sometimes have an only IPv6 connection.

20% of the world uses it.

Okay but 100% of the world uses IPv4. Why is having IPv6 support important for a website?

Because IPv4 is close to exhausted[1] and we need IPv6 support to be the rule, not the exception, by the time it's no longer affordable to get an IPv4 address.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPv4_address_exhaustion

Not supporting IPv6 is better than breaking in mysterious ways when you have IPv6 support but have to disable it on that machine for reasons (Netflix).

I would like to see Valve get with the times on their v6 support though.

I've never seen a dualstack connection cause breakage. And if it does break with IPv6 support being available, then it's the developer's fault. Instead of disabling IPv6 you should alert them of the problem and if possible use an alternative service, which supports IPv6.

In the case of Humble Bundle breaking, it seems simply because some of their CDN subdomains are IPv4-only. Since the site loads various resources from those IPv4-only endpoints, it causes everything to just break when accessing over IPv6. In a way I'd argue it's still better than your browser displaying "no valid IP address for this domain" – usually you can at least find an e-mail address at the bottom of the page to alert them to the problem.

>Though you may as well not count Humble Bundle as accessing their website over IPv6 results in it being completely broken

Just checked this in Firefox and it loads completely fine via IPv6 (and I verified using the devtools that it is using IPv6).

Should've clarified. In this case I was on a IPv6-only connection – no IPv4 access available to the outside. Loading with both IPv6 and IPv4 being available of course results in no problems, as it falls back to IPv4 for resources that are not accessible over IPv6 (which is mainly the layout scripts).

Also, if you have a Windows Update pending that requires a reboot, attempting to install anything from the Windows Store will fail, sometimes with a cryptic error code and sometimes not even that.

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