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Comment by cramjabsyn | Hacker News Reader

The IPv6 spec was published in 1998. 25 years on it should be nearly flawless. Not “most software,” all software including firewalls should support it with safe and sensible defaults.

The current state of support and adoption is frankly abysmal. The attack surface is non-negligable. And there is no end in sight.

The idea of deploying a new version of the internet protocol (which lacks backwards compatibility for reasons) in parallel to the existing version should never have left the drafting table.

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I agree it should be better but you’re talking roughly half of Google’s total traffic now, and it’s really common for people to be using it without even realizing that so I’m not sure I’d call it abysmal in the context of a large distributed system operated by millions of independent organizations around the world.

My understanding is that's because of smartphones, which automatically and seamlessly use IPv6, and most carriers support IPv6.

Outside of the world of smartphones, though, adoption is awful.

Phone carriers are responsible for a lot because they had nowhere near enough IPv4 capacity to handle all of the phones & other devices, but it’s not just them. A lot of people use IPv6 but never realize it because the experience is so smooth — all browsers use Happy Eyeballs and it tends to pick IPv6 because it’s often faster. I know that because I semi-regularly get support requests from developers wondering why they couldn’t access an IP-restricted service because they didn’t even realize that their browser had picked the IPv6 record because it responded faster.

> Phone carriers are responsible for a lot because they had nowhere near enough IPv4 capacity

Precisely so.

> all browsers use Happy Eyeballs and it tends to pick IPv6 because it’s often faster.

I know. This sort of thing causes me trouble every so often. I wish I could make browsers not do that.

I’m not sure there’s a better option: too many network operators are asleep at the switch and you’ll find networks where IPv6 works but v4 is subtly broken or vice versa. Asking nicely won’t get the stragglers to upgrade so what we probably need are economic incentives: as IPv6 becomes more common, providers charging for IPv4 is a good prod.

The most important thing is probably just pushing equipment vendors to set better defaults since that’s what a disturbing number of places will be using.

Thats the case in the US afaik. I don't know the stats globally but Switzerland has 40% and no mobile carrier supports IPv6 yet.

I'm not sure we ever really hit that bar (beyond adoption) with IPv4 either. A surprising amount of things don't really do it right and definitely not securely.

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