Many of today’s network devices, like printers, network cameras, and home gateways, are configured and managed using a web browser. The significant difficulty is that to access the device’s web page the user needs to know what IP address to type in to their web browser. Bonjour solves this problem. Safari displays a list of Bonjour-advertised web pages it finds on the local network, and to view a device’s page the user simply has to double-click on its name.
If the only thing you see in your Bonjour list is the “About Bonjour” link, then possibly you don’t have any devices on your local network that are accessible using a web browser. Or possibly you do have some, but they don’t yet support Bonjour. Virtually all network printers made today support Bonjour, as do devices like Axis network cameras. Other devices are starting to support Bonjour discovery too. If you have a network device that you can access by typing its IP address, but it doesn’t show up in Safari’s Bonjour list, contact the vendor to ask about Bonjour support.
Network administrators can also add records to their DNS server to create other entries which will automatically appear in Safari’s Bonjour list. For example, the network administrators running an airport Wi-Fi network could add an entry for a page giving flight departure times. A coffee house Wi-Fi network could show an entry for a page with the coffee house’s menu. A hotel network could show an entry for a page giving information about the hotel’s services.
You need to add Bonjour support to your device. Information on how to do this can be found on Apple’s developer pages, and in the O’Reilly book Zero Configuration Networking: The Definitive Guide.
Apple’s implementation of Bonjour for Mac OS X and iOS also runs on a wide variety of other platforms including Windows and Linux. It is Apache 2 Open Source and can be downloaded and used at no charge.
Other Open Source implementations also exist, such as Avahi and JmDNS.
If you're using an embedded development kit for your product, ask your development kit vendor about Bonjour support. For example, Microchip Wi-Fi kits include Bonjour capability.
Safari is available for both Mac and Windows.
To add Bonjour discovery to Microsoft Internet Explorer on Windows, install the Bonjour SDK for Windows.
Plugins for other web browsers are also available, such as DNSSD for Firefox.