I don’t agree with that assertion. Back in 2009 there were multiple big sites which did not want to touch IPv6 at all because of 0.1% of client networks being misconfigured in such a way that they failed to load pages with IPv6 support.
The improvements in browsers is what got major sites started deploying IPv6 to websites.
There are two other things I see as the real problems. First of all too many admins don’t have good monitoring of their site. Monitoring need to report problems even if they can be hidden by resilient client software.
Redundancy only improves reliability if you detect degradation and act on it before it affects users. If your monitoring only notice problems once they are bad enough to affect users as well, then you are not much better off than you would have been without redundancy and monitoring.
The other problem is that browsers produce terrible error messages when a page fails to load due to lack of IPv6 support. Currently you get a misleading error message suggesting the domain doesn’t exist, DNS is broken, or some vague error about network connectivity.
I’d rather see browsers introduce two new error messages to use when appropriate:
- This page cannot be displayed because the webserver is running an outdated network configuration. The webserver needs to be upgraded to support IPv6.
- This page cannot be displayed because your internet connection is using an outdated configuration. Your internet connection needs to be upgraded to support IPv6.