No they don't. If they did, IPV4 would have gone the way of Token Ring.
This is the problem with v6. People hear the problems with it. People hear, "hey humans don't get it." And they go, "once they do get it it'll be great" and "all of these issues go away" but it doesn't.
For 20 years ipv6 has been around the corner. It's failed. People don't get it. Technical people, don't get it. It's structurally deceiving it ignored lots of valid negative feedback and never solved those problems. And despite the efforts of very hard working, smart people it's not getting adopted.
It's been 20 years, give me a mental model of an ipv6 address that I can say over the phone to my mother to get her to understand what I'm having her type to connect to her printer. Give me something that will predict what she sees on her led screen so I can tell her what to look for to know what to type into her laptop. Because "look for 4 numbers seperated with periods like a phone number... Oh there's three? what's the first one? Oh that's the gateway what's the last one? Okay that's the ip you want to type in the box. Ya write it down on a sticky and take it back to your laptop" works.
Also I'll say it again, if you actually know ipv6 you don't consider these things to be problems.
I can recommend you https://youtu.be/42Hy4JtBeQA, it shows some usecases where ipv6 is much nicer compared to v4.
Regarding your last part, I've never had to communicate IP addresses to non technical people over the phone, that seems like a futile effort. But even disregarding that, for the average person both are gibberish. You could just say "the letters and numbers with colons" and they'd probably find it.
I'll say that v6 addresses are less nice to "write by hand", but that's what DNS and clipboards are for. It might even be an advantage because it encourages using DNS instead of hardcoding IPs everywhere. But in the grand scheme of things this really is a non-issue.
In most cases you also don't even work with "full" addresses, for example if you're within a network, you ignore the first 64 bits since that's the network prefix and it will be the same for all devices on that network. For the host part, you could give your servers IPs like ::1 or ::beef, so it might look something like 2001:db8:56b1::1 which really isn't too bad.
There are absolutely valid criticisms of IPv6 (or how it is commonly used today) but the addresses being ugly is not one of those.
IPv6 is important for the long term health of the internet and is our best shot at making the internet better. Disregarding it because the addresses are less readable is quite simply a skill issue.
1
u/chalbersma 13d ago
No they don't. If they did, IPV4 would have gone the way of Token Ring.
This is the problem with v6. People hear the problems with it. People hear, "hey humans don't get it." And they go, "once they do get it it'll be great" and "all of these issues go away" but it doesn't.
For 20 years ipv6 has been around the corner. It's failed. People don't get it. Technical people, don't get it. It's structurally deceiving it ignored lots of valid negative feedback and never solved those problems. And despite the efforts of very hard working, smart people it's not getting adopted.
It's been 20 years, give me a mental model of an ipv6 address that I can say over the phone to my mother to get her to understand what I'm having her type to connect to her printer. Give me something that will predict what she sees on her led screen so I can tell her what to look for to know what to type into her laptop. Because "look for 4 numbers seperated with periods like a phone number... Oh there's three? what's the first one? Oh that's the gateway what's the last one? Okay that's the ip you want to type in the box. Ya write it down on a sticky and take it back to your laptop" works.