this post was submitted on 09 Dec 2023
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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.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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

[–] stifle867 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Stable is v120, Beta is v121, Nightly is v122. Seeing as both the issue tracker and this user are reporting it working in Nightly (v122) you could use that version or wait until it trickles down.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

I can wait for it to trickle down. The bookmark workaround works so i can deal with that

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yep, another comment said its a bug that will be fixed in v122

[–] stifle867 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1807752

Says it will be fixed in v122 and a possible workaround is saving it as a bookmark and accessing it through there.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] stifle867 1 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

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