🏷️ Netfox 0.16.6 — a name that pointed at everything
Hey everyone 👋
Small release, but it fixes something that was quietly making a whole column useless.
🏷️ If your Mac's hosts file has a line like 127.0.0.1 shop.local, Local Services was showing shop.local next to every local port that answers on loopback — Raycast, Google Drive, mysqld, all of them. Every line was true. Not one of them told you anything.
📍 A hosts name points at an ADDRESS, not at a service. So now it is said once, above the group: "On this Mac they also answer as localhost and shop.local."
🎯 A name for one specific address stays on its row — that is where it actually distinguishes two listeners from each other.
🕶️ Demo Mode keeps localhost and hides the names you added yourself. They come from your own file, and this text ends up in screenshots.
👉 Free, notarized, macOS 15.6+: https://netfox.app
Curious what other people's hosts files look like — mine is mostly archaeology at this point 😅 What would you want Netfox to make readable next?
Replies
The hosts file detail is east to overlook, but this makes the Local Services view much more useful. Could the next step be grouping services by process or application?
Netfox
@jason_scott8 easy to overlook is exactly what made it a bug and not a nitpick — the name was accurate on every row it showed up on, which is why it lasted so long: nothing about it looked wrong, it just wasn't telling you anything. Good way to put it.
On the grouping: half of what you're describing is already in there, and it's the half that bites hardest. A pre-forking server used to get one row per worker, so a machine running nginx could show 39 entries for about four actual services. Those collapse now — one row per listener, with a count of how many processes sit behind it, and each row keeps the full process name (not truncated to nine characters the way the usual command-line tools do it) plus the pid.
What the rows are grouped by today is reach, not process: loopback-only on one side, anything reachable from the network on the other. That's deliberate, because it's the axis that answers the question the panel exists for — did I leave something open that I didn't mean to. Group by app instead and it reads better, no argument there, but two ports belonging to the same app end up side by side even when one is loopback-only and the other is open to every device on the network, and imo that's the one distinction you can't afford to bury.
So I'd want it as a second axis rather than a replacement — a By Process toggle beside the current view, same shape as the By Device / By Service switch that's already in the Security tool. It isn't on the public sequence as it stands (that lives at https://netfox.app/docs/roadmap), but it's going into my notes today, and the fact that the switch pattern already exists in the app makes it a smaller job than it sounds.