“Noticed your iPhone and Mac’s Wi-Fi weren’t so good over the last year?” Owen Williams reports for CIO. “You’re not alone, and Apple is finally fixing it, albeit quietly.”
“For the better part of twelve years, Apple used a single piece of software called ‘mDNSResponder’ to manage much of your Mac’s networking… In general, it worked flawlessly,” Williams reports. “When OS X Yosemite rolled around in late 2014, Apple decided to rip out the trusty DNS responder and replaced it with a new process called ‘discoveryd.’ …The replacement appeared to be related to the new Airdrop to iPhone feature that was part of the update.”
“The problems with discoveryd have been vast and unpredictable. You’ve probably run into at least one: duplicate computer names, random crashes, slow page loading, slow reconnection after sleep — the list goes on,” Williams reports. “At WWDC we’ve learned that Apple has killed discoveryd in both iOS 9 and OS X 10.11 and mDNSResponder is back once again. When we get the updates later this year, your devices’ Wi-Fi should be a lot more reliable.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yeah, we noticed.
SEE ALSO:
OS X Yosemite networking issues and ‘discoveryd’ – May 7, 2015
After many of complaints about Wi-Fi issues, Apple dumps discoveryd in latest OS X beta – May 27, 2015
Open letter to Tim Cook: Apple needs to do better – January 5, 2015
Apple delivers another Yosemite beta as vexing Wi-Fi issues persist – November 22, 2014
Thanks for working on wifi, Apple. Now can you fix Safari? It’s very slow to load pages. It’s so slow that I’ve switched to Chrome for now. It loads pages almost instantly.
Lee, it could be your DNS connection. See this article from MacObserver for an easy fix to try:
http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/web-pages-not-loading-heres-how-to-change-your-macs-dns-servers
Also, Apple has a Support article about this that explains the problem could be with the DNS server to which your Mac is trying to connect. If it’s not responding, Safari, and any other browser, might stall. Here’s the link:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT203244
I hope these help. Best of luck.
Brian, thank you for your reply and advice. They were certainly more helpful than a three-star rating. I have done what you and the articles suggested. Safari is now much faster, but still a bit slower at loading pages than Chrome. However, I will return to Safari as I prefer it overall. Thank you.
Will this work in Australia, or is it exclusive to the U.S.?
My internet radio kept dropping. That seems to have healed itself.
Yes – internet radio for me has been very unreliable on my iPad, while an older MacBook sharing the same internet connection handles radio and TV streams flawlessly. For a while I had been puzzled why a brand new iPad air could be outperformed by an old G4 MacBook.
We now know we have a wifi problem, duh. We’re going to fix, just not till we feel like it, I mean sometime later this year.
I’ve sucked up more data and paid for overages because when my iPhone would normally switch to a known network it doesn’t. Have to keep a watchful eye constantly on it.
You can grab mDNSResponder from Mavericks and replace the current Yosemite discoveryd file right now if you want. Many people have fixed there problems. If I was having problems I’d do it.
I look forward to the day when editors are finally addressing the overuse of the phrase “Apple is finally addressing”. I suspect this event will pass without my notice, perhaps with the release of El Capitan. Or, not.
“finally addressing” is vaporware until proven otherwise. Looking forward to it.
“Finally addressing”? it should be “…has fixed the problem” by now.
“Noticed your iPhone and Mac’s Wi-Fi weren’t so good over the last year?”
err…. actually.. no…
Me neither.
+1 nope, no problems here.
I took my first mini Retina back because it was dropping so much. The replacement gave me so many problems I almost took it back. I would take screen shots of my mini Airport Utility showing disconnected while my iPhone 6 would be online. My wife’s MBP seldom went down. I would say the wifi problem has been addressed somewhat as the wifi problem has only come up a few times in the since February. I even replace my flat AirPort Extreme with a new tower Extreme. That didn’t help either. The Genius people “couldn’t” figure it out.
First Yosemite update fixed the minor wifi-dropping issues I was having. Airdrop and Continuity between my Mac, iPhone and iPad usually work, but sometimes glitchy–last time I had to restart the iPad before it could receive AD’ed files
I did have severe wi-fi problems with my old 2010 MacBook and iPhone 4S, but since I’ve updated both, the iPhone last November and my MacBook to a MacBook Pro this spring – zero problems so far.
I hope the problems don’t start again when Apple reverses back to the old tech…!
Thank gawd!
Had all those issues and was blaming my computer for being to old. Best one was the 50+ wifi’s that showed up on my “Desktop’s” trusted WiFi’s list. WTF? My desktop hasn’t left my house…ever. Where did these 50+ WiFi networks come from and why was my local home WiFi about 36th on the list?
This was very unfortunate considering it says to list them in “order”. So each wake-up it went through the list trying to connect until it hit #36……really?
Yeah, I normally don’t complain about this kind of stuff but, damn! This one could have been costly for me.
@iGads
That sounds like you enabled iCloud Keychain, which syncs your wifi passwords between all devices. This generally is very useful to people. On the Mac, if you just drag your home network to the top of the list in wifi preferences and save, your desktop will connect faster.
In any case, this will NOT be fixed by Apple reverting back to Bonjour.
Since the last iOS update my car Bluetooth has had pairing difficulties it previously did not have.
The TuneIn Radio app that would previously transition to the car Bluetooth seamlessly now stubbornly refuses to continue until you activate the phone (like calling time/temperature) and then hanging up after the Phone forces the BT connection.
One year.
How a bad piece of software can kill the whole operating system user experience.
10.10.4 (dev beta) has already dropped discoveryd. Should see this for public release in the next couple of weeks! Splendid 😉
Never had any problem, EXCEPT when I tried using the built-in WiFi router that came with Comcast’s “new and improved” cable modem. They sent it to me at about the time that Yosemite was released. All sorts of issues, including staying connected and speed drops.
I added my very old AirPort Extreme Base Station back (the first square model with “n”), directly connected by Ethernet to the new cable modem (like before), and everything works properly again.
In fact, it works better now because that flakey built-in WiFi router (still turned ON) does work reliably for older slower devices that are “g” and “b.” So, I set my AEBS to “n-only” for the first time, and its connection is now faster with my more recent Macs, iPad, and Apple TV.
Comcast can be a problem. The trick is to get the dual band wireless modem/router and then call tech support enough times to get a non-idiot to configure the settings on your account.
I had an account that was supposed to provide about 50 Mbps. They upgraded their service which should have doubled my download speed, but it plummeted to roughly 7 Mbps. Multiple calls to tech support and multiple modem/routers, the last one being their top-of-the-line dual band modem, which halved my speed. Another call to tech support and wonder of wonders I got a non-idiot!! She looked at my account settings, fiddled around a bit, and said try it now.
It went from about 3.5 Mbps to over 125 Mbps.
I guess the secret to happiness is avoiding idiots. Whether the idiots work for Apple and design operating systems or they work for Comcast and manipulate your account settings. Sometimes it’s not so easy.
Great.
Now if they’ll only address the Bluetooh issues as well….
discoveryd was also dropped in the 10.10.4 Yosemite beta so hopefully we can experience this sooner rather than later. It’s disheartening to see my newer MBP only get 2.4 mbps download because of Bluetooth devices while my older iMac using wired keyboard and mouse but farther away and on a different floor consistently shows 50+ mbps.
Right, only problems I’ve had is with Bluetooth where Google Maps audio and the like don’t transition correctly. The audio goes off from the app and then it’s ten seconds until the car radio comes back on. Used to be one second back on iOS 7 (I think?). No other changes.
Based upon a comment in another blog, I just switched to OpenDNS https://www.opendns.com
I had been with them for a few years, somewhere in the OS updates, I lost them and did not realize it.
MUCH faster than default DNS settings in all respects.
Wonder if this will fix the problem where Time Machine backups cause my connection to drop…