There is a question that comes up every time something feels slow, and until now Netfox could not answer it: is the problem my own connection, or is it everything past my door?
That is what 0.18.0 does.
The Overview has a new panel, and it reads the layer underneath the IP address — where the cable and the radio actually live.
What the cable negotiated, against what it could have. A 10-gigabit port that settled for 1 Gb/s is not broken, and nothing in macOS will tell you it happened. Netfox names it, along with the two usual reasons: the cable, or the switch at the other end. Cat 5e runs 1 Gb/s; 10 needs Cat 6a and a switch that speaks it.
What the radio is doing, and whether it is holding. "Wi-Fi 7 at 720 Mb/s" means little on its own — "39 dB of headroom, signal against noise" means you have room to spare. And because a radio's reported speed is what the link is doing right now rather than a property of it, the panel takes two samples and tells you what changed between them. That is not decoration: while this was being built, the radio moved half a gigabit in two seconds, on the same network, in the same room. A single reading would have presented that as a fact about your hardware.
Whether anything is being dropped — in the last two seconds, and since your Mac booted. Two separate claims, deliberately, because neither implies the other. A link that has been clean for weeks can start dropping frames this second; one that dropped a handful during a cable swap last month is clean now.
And how far away the delay starts. "First hop 3.6 ms, then 11 ms more past the router." Your own link, and the internet beyond it, as two numbers instead of one. That split is the difference between a problem you can fix and one you can only wait out.
The part I am most pleased with is what the panel refuses to say.
A radio that is switched off has no band and no channel, so those are left out rather than filled in with "Unknown" — an absence rendered as two facts is worse than a gap. A link nothing crossed gets no clean bill of health: it has not been shown to be fine, it has not been shown anything. And a router that ignores pings is reported as untimeable rather than broken, because plenty of them drop pings by policy.
Every latency figure is a minimum rather than an average, and that was measured rather than assumed. Across five bursts the minimum moved by under a millisecond while the average moved by more than a hundred, because one delayed reply drags a mean of five readings and moves a minimum not at all. My first explanation for that was wrong, confidently, and four more measurements killed it.
The Overview also fits on one screen again — the banner that counted devices needing attention became the first card of the summary and brought its Smart Scan button with it, and the network and link panels sit side by side when there is room.
Nothing new is asked of you: no permission prompt, no privileged helper, and no traffic beyond the latency check, which rides the same switch as the public-IP lookup. Six languages, in step.
Update from Netfox → Check for Updates, or download it at https://netfox.app
As always, tell me what you would like to see next.
Netfox is free, a universal binary (Apple Silicon + Intel), runs on macOS 15.6+, and is signed and notarized.
Netfox for macOS — Website: https://netfox.app · Download: https://netfox.app/download
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