Ideally your printer advertises itself via Bonjour/Avahi/SLP or whatevs. Ideally Windows receives these adverts and connects you to your printer. One or the other gets it wrong, with monotonous regularity.

IPP is print anywhere and it sounds like its been branded "Mopria".

I ditched a thing called HPLIP at home at least five years ago which used to be the cutting edge for Linux printing on HP printers. The bloke that developed CUPS said it was a good idea and I went for it.

Now it just works - always. It sounds like Windows is catching up, finally.

Of course, not all routers (particularly combo router/modems provided by your ISP) support multicast DNS, so often this isn't an option.

I haven't seen a home router that doesn't support Bonjour in the past decade. It's a fundamental component in the Apple ecosystem and any home router that didn't allow one to wireless print from their iPhone would be considered broken.

Do people really wireless print from their iPhone? Not once can I say I've wanted to print from my phone.

Yes iphone wireless printing works great esp PDF attachments in emails. I use it quite a bit.

The router doesn't really need to support anything, the mDNS packets just flood the bridge domain directly between clients like any other flooded packet.

That’s the nice thing about mDNS. No flooding of anything since it’s multicast and not broadcast.

It would be nice... if it were actually "real" multicast :). It's instead link-local multicast, which has none of the filtering advantages of traditional IP multicast (i.e. no group joining via IGMP is performed for the switches/routers to be able learn who actually needs to listen) https://community.cisco.com/t5/switching/route-igmp-link-loc... https://community.cisco.com/t5/switching/multicast-on-the-la....

The advantage of link-local multicast over a plain broadcast is it gives a unique address (IP and multicast) so the clients themselves can more easily filter them. That's about it.

Starlink routers don't forward mDNS packets between clients, and neither did our Fios router before that.

Airprint and Mopria are the same thing, IPP + discovery.

It could be your router giving it a new IP address, but the printer itself hopefully has a static MAC address. Check your router settings for static IP assignment, they may be under a section called DHCP. Over there you could give it a static IP address for its current MAC address

EDIT: this comment no longer makes sense after the parent comment was edited. It used to be explicitly asking for help and didn't mention any solutions like static IPs, nor did it spell out a general remark about how this complexity in consumer electronics is bad

You missed the point. I wasn't asking for help on how to assign a static IP address. My point was that ordinary people shouldn't have to know what an IP address is, let alone what a static IP address is, in this day and age.

That's wishful thinking, imo.

If you want to have a network, someone needs to know a bit of networking. Or you need someone you can call who does.

Don't get mad at the printer for what your router is doing to its IP address. This day and age isn't as advanced as you'd like it to be, or you need a new router that does what you expect.

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

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.

Part of the commoditization process for consumer products is that they are made to be user friendly for non-experts. Most other networked devices have already done this. Nobody needs to know how to configure /var/lib/dhcpd/dhcpd.leases to use an iPad on the router that Xfinity provides.

For the record, printers have been so bad with firmware/software that it literally inspired RMS to make GNU: https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/201cthe-printer-story201...

It's actually sometimes sold as a "security" feature - short DHCP leases with no memory.

Which is kinda silly, if the router hasn't needed to give the IP to another client, just remember it forever.

If people start using dynamic IPs as if they are static, when they really aren't, they're just setting themselves up for failure the next time the devices reboots or resets. It's better to either use static addressing if you want static addressing, or use DNS if you don't know what the IP is going to be.

I can't speak to printers (much less yours specifically) but most home routers (or more generally servers that act as both DHCP and DNS servers) will create DNS records in a locally-administered zone for each DHCP client according to the request. This same zone is then given as the DNS suffix as a DHCP option to the same set of clients. I would think that your printer does something similar, so if you add the printer by hostname (which you can probably locate by looking at DHCP leases in your router's web-based admin panel) instead of IP it should always "just work".

Is it using a WSD port by any chance? I work at an IT provider and 99.9 percent of the time a printer issue is caused by this useless feature.

ZeroConf actually works pretty well as long as everything is in the same range.

Is that on a Mac? Windows doesn't seem to support it.

It's called "Bonjour" on Windows and Mac. Windows doesn't have support out of the box, but you can get it. https://learn.adafruit.com/bonjour-zeroconf-networking-for-w...

Windows uses mdns natively now. That article is 10 years old.

Did you change your router settings? It should all heal up with a simple broadcast packet.

It could be your router defaults to blocking broadcast packets related to wireless devices. (Either in or out)

Range as in L2?

L3. ZeroConf is broadcast which doesn't go outside of your current IP's subnet.

I don’t bother owning a home printer. They basically all suck. Easier to just go to the library and print.

1. Buy a Brother laser printer

2. Put it on your Wi-Fi

3. There is no step three

This is basically like when people say dishwashers don’t do a good job because they’ve only bought ones designed by American MBAs. HP and Epson made good products in the previous century but are now customer-milking operations and it’s better to pretend they don’t exist.

Problem is high powered industrial dishwashers can't handle decorated plates ... pardon me, I meant to say color lasers can't handle photos well. If you're primarily printing texts and diagrams on A4 copier paper, this is total non-issue. But if you're looking to print nice colors, not necessarily.

I use my home printers to print forms and documents and other things in black and white; if I had a color laser it'd be similar.

Photos are printed at walmart, it's way too cheap for the quality to even bother with anything else.

True - color laser printers aren’t great photo quality but I stopped making home prints a decade or so back because the economics were brutal and when I do want to make prints I want them to be larger which just made it worse. Outsourcing that to Costco was much cheaper and easier than fussing around with ink cartridges, clogs or smears, etc.

I bought a Brother laser printer in 2018. I print maybe 3-4 times a year from home, and the damn thing works every time.

I've done nothing to it but put paper in it. The highest praise I can give a printer is: "I don't hate this one"

Get an old brother laser printer, they are rock solid.

Better yet, setup Airprint as well. The novelty of printing from my phone never wears off. (coming from an old head).

I just crossed the decade mark with my Brother HL-2240, purchased in June 2013. I put a Raspberry Pi + CUPS on it for network printing. The resolution is a little low and I wish I had color, but I did buy the printer for literally $60 new.

I really feel like the brother laser printer recommendations should all come with model numbers as not all brother laser printers are created equal. i have a DCP-L2550DW, and i'm not sure i'd recommend it.

Interesting—out of curiosity, what is your primary complaint with the DCP-L2550DW? I have one too and use it seamlessly for printing and scanning on Windows, Linux, iOS, and Android. My third party toner refills have worked great and the machine itself was rather inexpensive. Not invalidating your experience, as I may have just gotten lucky, but would be interested to know what issues it’s created for you.

the main complaint is that the feeder never pulls paper in the same orientation twice. i've tried printing on labels with various levels of not success. while the print quality is fine (no complaints there), if you are printing with pre-cut media, getting it to align is tough. i've used Avery media and then used their templates as well as measuring and making my own templates. the top rows will be with in the pre-cut, but they start to "drift" off so that by the end of the page they are off a full 1/16" meaning each row is not off by the same distance. if i select all items and then "squeeze" by pushing the bottom up 1/16" in illustrator, this seems to work. if i use that modified file on other printers, they won't print the same way.

i've also tried making cards by printing on both sides. creating a 2-page file with the mirrored offset like normal print would use, they don't line up. if i remove the mirrored offset (not a professional DTP, so whatever this called), it still doesn't line up. so i had to fiddle with it to get double sided prints to line up. on a different printer, the normal mirrored offset works as expected. i can then put the print on the guillotine and cut on the crop marks, and it all works. not with the 2550.

Only as anecdata, I am using Brother (B&W) laser printers since many years in the office and almost all worked and work just fine, but I had some bad experience with DCP-8110DN and MFC-8520DN models:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22083421

It seems like all the models sharing the same printing engine suffer from the same defect (fuser heats a bit too much and the sleeve and roller fail much earlier than expected).

That was fine for me until I had a special tax circumstance that couldn't be e-filed, hello gazillion pages! amongst the other random things I was printing at a library or fedex this pushed it over the edge

laser printers are the way

Half my family now owns the small desktop sized sub-£200 Kyocera laser printers. It was honestly revolutionary the first few times I was able to connect to their WiFi, hit add printer on my phone or laptop, press print, and it just worked with no drivers or network troubleshooting or anything.

They completely blow any consumer inkjet out of the water in ease of use, not having to install bloatware with popups telling you to buy more ink and preventing you from printing black and white when the magenta ink is "only" at 25%, printing speed, and the fact they don't outright break forever if you go 6 months without printing (where an Inkjet would often get irreparably clogged and be ruined).

No one says "I can't want to learn to code so I can program windows printer drivers". At the same time no company wants to pay the appropriate amount to hire people that can do this well. These two concepts come together in a fantastic display of mediocrity.

I might find it interesting, but I hate printer companies and they'd need to pay me extra to make up for the negative glamor

Apple seems to have solved this a long time ago.

I didn't even set up my printer, I just turned it on, connected it to the network, and all the Macs and iPhones print to it, no problem.

And then they made sure to follow through and make it work. Hiring people in itself doesn't lead to solutions. You have to give them the tools they need and set priorities acros teams accordingly.

Arguably if they had a half-decent team they could've done it without hiring the CUPS creator in the first place (like Apple did originally). Hiring him (which I support) simply gave them street cred and signaled to the company that this wasn't some unsupported effort.

Linux has really piggybacked on Apple's efforts with the result that printing is way better there now. Beyond just the years of their work on CUPS, AirPrint is the big deal. Almost all printers for years now understand one of the handful of image formats Apple supports for printers, and they advertise themselves and their capabilities with DNS-SD.

The result is that pretty much you can just print, driverless, to anything halfway recent. The driver situation was really uneven before.

I don't know why we really need Mopria, the system Windows is going with, when we have IPP Everywhere, but the differences between AirPrint, IPP Everywhere and Mopria seem pretty minor.

i just forward everything to fedex "print and go" (an email address which will handle print jobs) and figure it's cheaper in the long run rather than owning a printer at home