[lsbehe]

IPv6 isn't 6 bytes It's 16 bytes. With your example it would be 10.20.30.40.50.60.70.80.90.100.110.120.130.140.150.160

Also we don't live in a world where you type IP addresses into your browser. DNS is an unfortunate case but generally you don't have to do it constantly at least.

[dheera]

> Also we don't live in a world where you type IP addresses into your browser.

On the contrary, I do that all the time, when DNS servers/clients haven't updated caches yet, when I need to update routing tables, configure servers, routers, load balancers, and if I can't remember an IPv6 and have a demo coming up in 10 minutes with no transparency on when DNS servers will update, I'm going back to punching IPv4 addresses in my browser for the screenshare because the IPv4 addresses of ALL the machines I control on a day-to-day basis roll off the tip of my tongue.

My personal website, my cloud instances for my day job, my side project cloud instances, ALL of their IPv4 are in my head.

I'm a walking IPv4 DNS server, I can't do that for IPv6 and all the double-colon-ffef nonsense.

[WorldMaker]

The double colon is a place where IPv6 addresses are easier to memorize than IPv4 addresses. Double colon just means "fill with zeroes". You don't have to remember how many zeroes to fill in. You don't have to type in a long string of zeroes. You just need to remember the prefix and suffix.

If you are assigning all the IPv6 IPs by hand like you might in a private network, the suffix can be as short as you wish: prefix:: is your Device 0, prefix::1 is your Device 1, prefix::2 is your Device 2, prefix::f is your Device 15, and so forth. At that point you only have to memorize your prefix, which is just your subnet. If the subnet you are assigned is 2001:db8:: for instance you just need to remember that 2001:db:: as your prefix and add whatever device number you need after it. Sure, it's unlikely to have a prefix exactly that short, but sometimes you can luck out with a lot of zeroes. Private networking today (Unique Local Addresses) is fd00::/8 where you are expected to pick a 40-bit random string to make it a /48. That's just three groups to memorize for your entire private network: fd01:2345:6789::.

::ffef from that perspective implies you are accessing Device 65,519. If you are trying to remember that many devices you may have other problems.

On the flipside, if you are assigning your own IPv6 suffixes anyway you can also use school kid "1337" "calculator" hacks in hex like setting up a key servers to be ::beef or ::dead or ::dead:beef or ::feed or ::8008. Potentially way more memorable "words" than numbers just between 0 and 255.

[megous]

Or just edit /etc/hosts

Or use mDNS. If your whatever machine on IPv6 network is named abc just open abc.local in the browser. Done.