firefox mobile cant access ipv6 sites directly

shortwavesurfer@monero.town to Firefox@lemmy.ml – 38 points –

If i put say 123.123.123.123 into firefox desktop or mobile it will try to load a webpage from that host. If i put http://[ipv6] into desktop it works as well. If i do the same on mobile it sends it to my search engine as a query.

12

I have two firefox mobile browsers: beta and nightly. In Nightly this redirects to https://heise.de/ while in Beta, it opens google search: http://[2a02:2e0:3fe:1001:302::]

This might have something to do with different proxy settings on both.

No, it has to do with UI element where you type addresses and searches (input box). It's a very old bug, you can find issues on GitHub, Bugzilla etc.

Input box is supposed to understand whether what you type is an address, and if not, it is being treated as a search query. To understand if it's an address, it uses Regular Expressions. Their regular expression is wrong, so it can find IPv4 address, but can't find IPv6. As simple as that.

There were some pull requests to fix that, but guys at Mozilla said that those pull requests lead to performance regressions and rejected that.

I know all of this because I could not use IPv6 addresses too and hadbl to look for the issue and find workarounds.

There were some pull requests to fix that, but guys at Mozilla said that those pull requests lead to performance regressions and rejected that.

The latest PR was accepted in November, so IPv6 literals work in v122 alpha.

What version is nightly? Its aplarently being fixed in v122.

122.0a1 (Build #2015990183), 416b0de9fa+ GV: 122.0a1-20231206213012 AS: 122.20231206050313

Obvious question but is your phone on an IP v6 network?

What does that have to do with anything?

It's only once you visit a website that it matters whether you're on an IPv6 network. OP isn't visiting the website at all; they're just typing the address and being taken to their search engine

Because if OP was trying to access an IP v6 address from an IPv4 network that wouldn't work. It wasn't obvious to me where the issue lies.

I think your misunderstanding comes from the fact that "wouldn't work" can mean a lot of things, and you didn't know quite what it meant

If

  1. you're not on an IPv6 network,
  2. you enter the IPv6 address of a website into the address bar and
  3. the browser attempts to load that website (not a search engine),

then the connection will time out:

OP never got to step 3, which indicates a problem with the browser

Is it a link-local address? I remember having problems with these.

Its an internet reachable address starting with 26xx but apparently its going to be fixed in ff v122. Its only affecting mobile ff but not desktop