i don't know what you tried, but i found it by scrolling down and then a single click. then i went back and found that two clicks without scrolling would have done it.
you are right about the problem of hard to remember IP addresses, but i don't think it is that bad.
They don't care at all about all the stuff you care about.
i don't understand this argument. users who don't care would not even bother to change the DNS. and those that do will change their settings once and be done with it. a memorable IP mainly benefits those that set up devices frequently.
As others have noted, my take is slightly unreasonable, but reflects the reality of them.
To be a bit less "stressed, bored and angry ape"-ish, I still see the problem with IPs, that are not as rememberable as possible, and I also think the website should have one of their IPs front and center and reachable without scrolling.
DNS Servers are a strange product. It is very high stakes and very low stakes at the same time.
Without DNS nothing works anymore. Slow servers are a mayor pain. DNS is *the* single point of failure in our electronic lives. So everything is high stakes.
At the same time, DNS is boring as hell. Everyone can run their own DNS server in minutes, there are resolving DNS servers everywhere, you can choose whichever, they will all work like 99,999% the same. It mostly makes no difference, at all, which DNS server someone uses.
So if someone wants to break into that market, they need to be as convincing as possible. Why should I change? How much energy does it take to change? How likely is it, that this new service will be faulty, slow, or does things different, so my users and I are blocked and therefore angry? And if they are angry, can I tell them "oh, google messed up, the internet is broken, nothing I can do here, just wait a bit", or do I have to say "sorry for selecting an unreliable service, I will repair it for you (for free)".
Google DNS and Cloudflare captured the marked with "we are the fastest, and biggest, you will never experience downtime or slowness". And they proved (mostly) that I can count on that.
Quad9 take is "we are fast, big, and we will fight for freedom". Maybe. I honestly forgot, because I can already choose from two others. I just know, that if 8.8.8.8 and 1.1.1.1 fails, I try 9.9.9.9, if that also fails, my network config is definitely fried.
In this space, it is ultra hard to create a new product. Remove friction, get more users. This is all, I wanted to say.
DNS is extremely interesting because it is a distributed network that everyone depends on. DNS has security innovations with DNSSEC, DANE, TLSA. Granted, authoritative nameservers may be more interesting than resolvers, but resolvers have a lot to them, too.
> Everyone can run their own DNS server in minutes, there are resolving DNS servers everywhere, you can choose whichever, they will all work like 99,999% the same.
I ran my own resolver for a while and the latency was terrible. A lot of effort goes into getting good latency everywhere.
> It mostly makes no difference, at all, which DNS server someone uses*
Yea it does. DNS is often the first place governments will apply censorship, since it’s easier than applying for a takedown when what they seek to censor is not illegal in the hosting country.
After reading your claim, I have thought that the first time I have not scrolled enough.
So I scrolled everything without seeing any information, then I have tried the "Set It Up" buttons, which have only taken me to other pages with verbose but useless information.
However, some time later, I have tried again a "Set It Up" button, and this time it showed a popup with the IP addresses or URLs of the servers, which I assume that is what you have seen.
But at least for me, this did not happen at the first attempt, when I could not reach easily this information, despite performing the same steps as later.
you are right about the problem of hard to remember IP addresses, but i don't think it is that bad.
They don't care at all about all the stuff you care about.
i don't understand this argument. users who don't care would not even bother to change the DNS. and those that do will change their settings once and be done with it. a memorable IP mainly benefits those that set up devices frequently.