One weekend I opened v2ex in Google Chrome, ready to swim in the ocean of knowledge, only to be greeted by “Server IP address could not be found.” Other browsers loaded the site just fine. At first I blamed the campus network, but since I could still get in elsewhere I let it slide. When I got home, however, Chrome still refused to reach v2ex—and not just v2ex; several perfectly innocent bookmarks were suddenly unreachable too.

Unacceptable. I suspected a local DNS issue, so I cycled through a few public resolvers—no luck. Updated the browser: nothing. Reset the browser: still nothing. Out of ideas, I hit the search engines.

As expected, the top Baidu results were copy-paste clones. The rest suggested resetting the entire network stack, scolded me for using Chrome in the first place, or blamed proxy settings. I tried every “fix” anyway—zero effect.

Left to my own devices, I reasoned that if other browsers worked, the machine’s DNS was fine; the problem had to be inside Chrome itself. I suddenly remembered a plugin recommending Alibaba’s public DNS. On a whim I’d enabled it earlier. Could that be the culprit?

I hunted down the “Use secure DNS” toggle, flipped it off, relaunched Chrome—and every site loaded instantly.

Final thoughts: Alibaba’s public DNS can shave a few milliseconds off resolution, but most of the time you won’t notice, and it breaks sites like v2ex and campus-login portals. For me the downsides outweigh the gains, so I dropped it. As for why the reset didn’t help—immediately after resetting I signed back into my Google account, which promptly re-synced all the old settings. So yes, reinstalling (or resetting) really does fix 99 % of problems… provided you don’t immediately restore the very config that caused them.