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Comment by breadwinner | Hacker News Reader

Thankfully people at Apple thought this can be easier. They came up with Bonjour... Bonjour is apparently also known as ZeroConf [1].

Microsoft is behind the times.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero-configuration_networking

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Bonjour struggles to find printers much more than Windows. My Windows users just click add printer and it just works. And let's not talk about file shares. Macs literally can't connect to any file shares except Windows ones (since AFP is out of support), and then only with Samba, and only with Apple's botched implementation of Samba which crashes, because it needs to create metafile databases on said shares, if a share has too many files. Try opening a file share with 20k+ images in the root from your latest Mac. Seems to me, as a mixed OS business operator, that it's Apple that's behind the times. Even out of service Chromecast devices and decades old Linux distros are better at network discovery than Bonjour.

I can’t comment on the file share tangent, but in my experience with a Bonjour-equipped Brother laser printer over the past eight or so years, I don’t think I can recall it failing to connect once.

Granted, I’m on a Mac and I print about five times a year, so YMMV.

I don't doubt that a one computer, one printer, scenario is any problem for any OS. You'll see who the ugly one is when the kids play together. File sharing isn't a tangent. The purpose of Bonjour is to couple printing and file sharing as a network discovery protocol.

But a one printer one computer being a problem is precisely the issue in the thread at hand. Once the router reboots the printer changes IP address (since it gets a dynamic IP by default) and then Windows can't find it, hence the need to assign it a static IP.

This specific chain is about Bonjour and, more specifically, is a response to a claim that Microsoft is behind the times. The "Windows can't find my printer" issue is already addressed by other responses. Windows can find your printer even if the IP changes, assuming the printer wasn't installed in a way that circumvents that. (E.g. by not choosing to find it automatically and using an IP address against the on screen recommendations.)

The only thing I know about Bonjour is that I had to uninstall it every time after installing iTunes on my PC.

I used to do that too because I didn’t know what it was or why I would want it. Now I intentionally have it installed without iTunes since its so handy.

Chances are it's installed right now. It's bundled with so many things.

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