| IPv6 Network - Browsing the Web |
IPv6 Network - Browsing the Web - Web browsing is a very good example of an application that doesn’t really need IPv6 support, because the HTTP protocol isn’t bothered by network address translation. On the other hand, the Web is the most visible part of the Internet experience, so it’s a good place the gain some real-world IPv6 exposure. And good luck finding a dancing turtle anywhere else than on the IPv6-version of the http://www.kame.net/ website! The IPv6 status of the leading browsers is as follows:
Internet Explorer supports IPv6 under Windows. It doesn’t support the [2001:db8:31:1::2] literal IPv6 address format in URLs (RFC 2732). Internet Explorer for the Mac doesn’t support IPv6. Netscape has a few IPv6-enabled versions (Linux), but they’re not always easy to find.
Mozilla, on the other hand, has more extensive IPv6 support, but it’s still common to find IPv4-only binaries, especially for the Mac. Safari, Apple’s browser, supports IPv6 in version 1.3 under MacOS 10.3 Panther, but you wouldn’t know it: Safari 1.3 prefers IPv4 over IPv6, without even falling back on IPv6 when IPv4 doesn’t work. Older versions of Safari support literal IPv6 URLs, but newer ones only do this when the trick mentioned below is in effect. As of Safari 2.0 that comes with MacOS 10.4 Tiger, the program has full IPv6 support: it tries IPv6 first and falls back on IPv4 if IPv6 doesn’t work. Konqueror will load pages over IPv6, but it doesn’t fall back on IPv4.
Konqueror is the browser application that’s part of the K Desktop Environment (KDE), a graphical desktop environment for (mostly) Linux. Lynx, the text-only browser, suffers from the “it’s in the source, but good luck finding a binary that supports it” syndrome, so you may have to hunt down an IPv6-enabled binary distribution or build it from source yourself.
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