Add Ping to Address Bar in Firefox and Opera

Posted by Martin in Browsing, firefox, opera  Tags: , , , , , ,

18

Mar



Found this useful tip on how to add a ping shortcut to your Firefox address bar over at Lifehacker. I love its simplicity. Pinging servers is a great way of finding out if they are currently up and running. The time it takes to receive a response is measured in milliseconds and a timeout is returned if it takes to long.

This Firefox tip does not require a plugin, add-on or Greasemonkey script. All you need to do is create a new bookmark of the url: http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=ping&host=%s. Now all that is left to do is to add the keyword ping to the service when you add it as a bookmark.

The keyword command is a way to access an url without typing it. The good thing about is that you can pass parameters. If you want to ping a server you enter ping url in the address bar of Firefox, e.g. ping ghacks.net.

Firefox will recognize the ping keyword and load the url http://network-tools.com/default.asp?prog=ping&host=ghacks.net which displays the ping on the website.

You can do the same in Opera. The keywords are named nicknames there but are basically the same. I have not tested it but it should work fine. Let me know if you try that out.


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5 Users Commented In This Post

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Mike says, March 18th, 2008   

Could not get this to work. I’m using Firefox 3b4 and I added the URL to my bookmarks with the Ping tag. When I type ping in my address bar the site comes up but it won’t attach the domain I type after it to the end of the ping service’s url. Any ideas?

Marc-O says, March 18th, 2008   

I think a simpler way to add this to opera is to load the page, right-click the textbox and select something like “create custom search”, and then simply add “ping” to the keyword command.

It’s one of my favorite opera functionnality (custom search). So much as it render the google search box useless… Actually, it’s directly the google philosophy, in the browser: just one textbox…

(I haven’t tested yet, but I will tonight)

Mutant says, March 18th, 2008   

I did try it out.It worked for ghacks.net and it gave me the following result.

“Average time over 10 pings: 130.8 ms”

but how to interpret it?

Marc-O says, March 19th, 2008   

verified. On opera, right click on the textbox, select “create search”, and add the “ping” keyword.

Martin says, March 23rd, 2008   

Mutant a ping abot 100ms is normally very bad unless you are on a slow connection

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