Flying Penguin Technologies

Today I found myself revisiting a prior experiment: what does the web look like when you turn off IPv4 for a day. I keep an access network available that has no IPv4 connectivity, only IPv6. As such I am able to run these tests whenever I like. I am pleased to report that, in general, things look a lot better. Most of the big sites work but some of the smaller hosts haven't caught up yet. In general, I can go quite awhile before running into a "Could not find that site" error.

From a statistics standpoint, I wanted to make a new version of the table from that original blog post. Given that Alexa is now gone, I turned to the Wikipedia List of most visited websites. This list is synthesized from two newer sites that themselves are not IPv6-reachable.

I ran each of the top 10 domains through the Mythic Beasts IPv6 health check, which gives more detail than the ip6.nl checks. The table below lists the scores at the time of this writing, which you can click on to see the full results. This will include mail checks, discussion of which could probably fill another blog post.

Additionally, I checked to see if the website actually loads from my laptop sitting in aforementioned IPv6-only network for final ground truth.

Of these, only x.com has no IPv6-reachable DNS, but that point is somewhat moot since the actual site has no AAAA records.

I didn't dig deeply into whether all the content sub-domains work on these sites. A casual glance showed the ones that loaded all seemed to fully load. I still run into those kind of problems on some other sites I frequent, especially news sites.

How do you think your daily routine would fare if you were suddenly cut off from the legacy Internet?