Airprint Wonkiness

December 9, 2023 6:39 AM

I used to be able to print from my iPhone (11 Pro Max) via AirPrint to my Epson ET-3750 wireless printer. Some time ago, I stopped being able to send any print job from either iPhone's Safari or Chrome.

The printer shows up as available, but no print job is started. I can print from iPhone Mail and other apps to the same printer. I am sitting next to the printer and within 6 feet of the router. I can print from browsers on other iDevices in the house.

Can you help me figure out how to again print from iPhone Safari? (I don't really care about Chrome; I just tried that to see if printing worked there.) Why can I print from other apps but not from either browser?

Iphone 11 Pro Max running iOS 17.12. Epson ET-3750 printer.

posted by Joleta to Technology (7 answers total)

Curious! Given how horrible printers are and how opaque iOS is, my first step would be to delete and reinstall the browsers giving me problems.

Does the printer do anything when you send the jobs? At all? Like wake up from sleep or anything? Or do the jobs just go into the void?

Also looks like people are having problems with printing and iOS 17. There are a few tips in that thread: Reset printer to factory settings, printer firmware updates, and toggling private address on and off.
posted by Pudding Yeti at 10:37 AM on December 9, 2023

Response by poster: @Pudding Yeti: Thanks for your suggestions.

Apple doesn't allow uninstalling Safari on iPhones. I uninstalled and reinstalled Chrome, but that didn't help.

I turned Private Wi-Fi Address off and that didn't make any difference in either Safari or Chrome.

When I try to print, the printer says it is printing with the "circling" icon, but eventually it returns to the home screen and nothing prints.

My printer's firmware is up to date. I'm reluctant to reset it to factory settings as everything else is working. My workaround is to save any web page I want to print to Instapaper, then retrieve it on my iMac and print from there.
posted by Joleta at 1:12 PM on December 9, 2023

I don't have this printer but the user guide says:

> Note: If you disabled paper configuration messages on your product control panel, you cannot use AirPrint. See the link below to enable the messages, if necessary

Perhaps this could explain why you can see the printer but it times-out because it's not allowed to show you some paper config message?

The setting would be under:

[home button] > Settings > General Settings > Printer Settings.
make sure Paper Setup Auto Display is set to ON.
posted by bluecore at 2:59 PM on December 9, 2023

Response by poster: @bluecore Thanks for the suggestion. Paper Setup Auto Display is set to on. I can AirPrint from other apps on my phone, just not from either Safari or Chrome.
posted by Joleta at 7:46 AM on December 10, 2023

Best answer: Some time ago, I stopped being able to send any print job from either iPhone's Safari or Chrome.

You mention this was a while ago, but how "some time ago" was it? Long enough ago that your phone's been turned off completely and turned back on again since? Safari (and the pretend-Safari that looks like Chrome, but isn't, on iOS) has a habit of getting into some very weird states over time and never really recovering without anything short of a reboot. There's some underlying OS bit that the view controller is relying on which just seems to go sideways.

This may or may not be the problem in your case, but it's a possibility if your phone's uptime is really long.
posted by majick at 12:20 PM on December 10, 2023

Response by poster: @majick I'm sure I rebooted my phone many times since this printing problem started, but darn! I just rebooted it again and now it's printing. Let's see if this fix sticks. Thanks for the suggestion.
posted by Joleta at 8:09 PM on December 10, 2023

Response by poster: Just to follow up: Printing stopped working again and rebooting my phone no longer fixes the problem. Giving up for now and just printing from the computer.
posted by Joleta at 8:14 PM on December 11, 2023