alt Hacker NewsI keep IPv4 off on a media computer all the time out of curiosity. IPv6-only is still unusable because only about 5% to 10% of top sites that I find during a Google Search work. It's almost guaranteed that a website will not load on all the top results.
So even if it's true 50% of clients support IPv6, only about 5% to 10% of website hosts do.
Sure a person can do a dual-stack setup or do some IPv4-IPv6 translation, but seriously IPv6-only should be plug-and-play by now.
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That's very surprising. Cloudflare supports ipv6 and it would be surprising if only 10% of websites you visit use Cloudflare.
> ...IPv6-only should be plug-and-play by now.
The obsession about "IPv6 only" has never made sense to me. Any decent firewall software will let you write rules that apply regardless of IP version. The "software complexity" argument is bunk... you already have v4 and v6 IP implementations in your OS, and every major OS has provided IP-version-agnostic socket interface code for much more than ten years. If you are using software that is IPv6-capable, it's very likely that it's using IP version agnostic library functions.
Unless stewardship of the Internet is wrested from the hands of the responsible, level-headed type of folks that run it now and transferred to the hands of folks who think nothing of making backwards-incompatible changes every six months, IPv4 won't stop running across the Internet within the lifetime of anyone who's currently reading HN. This delay is fine. The only thing about IPv4 that's a problem is that its address space is 32 bits wide. Had it been defined with a 128+ bit address space, we wouldn't have seen another version of IP on the Internet. Now that IPv6 is around to reduce address pressure, there's no big need to do anything about IPv4.
Cloud providers and hosters seem to have the least interest in implementing IPv6. Sitting on a huge supply of IPv4 addresses gives them a competitive advantage. So they try to disable IPv6 as a default.