Thank you! This sounds promising. However, I have only noticed the issue on Mac (not iPad or iPhone) and it also seems to occur when using mobile data (with iPhone as WiFi hotspot) so in my case it doesn't seem to be network related. But I admit I haven't tested this properly, and I haven't tried other WiFi networks yet (which I can't do as of now, because I would have to go and work for at least an entire day somewhere else, and that's not an option at the moment).
A few weeks ago I also played with the privacy settings you mention for both Safari and my network, without success.
But I didn't try disabling IPv6 yet, so I'll try to figure that out.
I'll come back here if I find anything. Thank you so much for your feedback!
Edit: To my surprise, I just found out that my internet provider doesn't support IPv6 yet, so that couldn't be the issue either.
The general processes of eliminating a troublesome connection, especially when you’re finding it’s happening only at home, is to disable IPv6 support at both your router and also in your Network prefPane advanced settings. Even if your provider has never offered IPv6, your router’s OS, unless you have an excessively old router (like, think of routers which only pumped out 802.11b/g during the aughties), will likely have a provision for it. You’ll want to disable IPv6 on the router configuration settings page and then save that setting. Next, go ahead and, for good measure, power down and unplug your router for, say, 30 seconds. Plug it back in, and power it back on.
It’s not uncommon for both routers (and devices/laptops/etc/) to have that IPv6 setting to be “on” by default, as it usually is there as a kind of standby for the event the router is being connected to a mixed IPv4/IPv6 network or an exclusively IPv6 one. It’s a feature I shut off entirely on my router and on all my Macs (which still have that option). You can find this on the Network prefPane’s “TCP/IP” tab.
Now, over to your Mac…
On more recent versions of macOS, there is no prefPane provision for shutting off IPv6 completely, but there is the next-best workaround of setting IPv6 to “link-local only”. This, in effect, treats the IPv6 protocol to be a kind of “localhost-only” with no routing to the internet. It will still self-generate an IPv6 address for your Mac, but it won’t be associated with any network — whether an IPv6 local network or an IPv6 internet network. In other words, a “semi-off” setting which will be ignored in favour for applications and services to rely entirely on IPv4 (which is what you want).
In this situation, the option of completely immolating a current build of the OS with a total re-install is extreme and a usually avoidable time-suck. But you
can start with a completely fresh network profile on your Mac. This workaround involves using the Network prefPane to create a new, clean, fresh network profile. Under “Location”, it will likely be set to the default of “Automatic”.
On that pull-down, you can create a fresh network profile from this (name it whatever you’d like as a way to distinguish it as your replacement profile), within which you can then go ahead. On the Network prefPane, under the “Network name” pull-down, select your wifi network (you will probably need to re-add your password, as this is being treated like a brand-new connection profile).
Once logged in to your wifi router, a green light should appear next to your wifi option on the left-hand list.
Now, go back into “advanced…” and, though optional, go back once more to the “TCP/IP” tab to verify your IPv4 is set to (in most cases) “Using DHCP” and that the IPv4, Subnet Mask, and Router IP addresses have been filled automatically by your wifi router (the IPv4 address will be the one assigned to your computer by your wifi router, and ought to start with something like “192.168
.x.x” or maybe ”10.0
.x.x” (“
x” here are variables). If not, you can also try clicking the “renew DHCP lease” button. Choose “OK”, then on the main Network prefPane, choose “Apply”.
Hopefully, that should do it. Let us know how it goes.
