Add Ping to Address Bar in Firefox and Opera

Martin Brinkmann
Mar 18, 2008
Updated • Feb 5, 2015
Internet
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6

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 too long.

While you can use extensions or add-ons for that, or use the command line of the operating system you are using, it may be faster if you are already using the browser.

This Firefox tip does not require a plugin, add-on or Greasemonkey script. All you need to do is create a new bookmark that links to 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.

To do so, press the Alt-key on your keyboard and select Bookmarks > Show all bookmarks from the menu that opens up. Right-click on Bookmarks Menu or Unsorted Bookmarks and select New Bookmark from the context menu that opens up.

firefox ping 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 to ping this site.

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 called 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.

Since Network Tools is offering other tools on its website, you can use the same method to add trace or whois bookmarks to Firefox to run them from the address bar whenever the need arises.

Summary
Add Ping to Address Bar in Firefox and Opera
Article Name
Add Ping to Address Bar in Firefox and Opera
Description
Find out how to add ping commands to Firefox to ping any website right from the web browser's address bar.
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Comments

  1. ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
    Reply

    Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?

    1. Martin Brinkmann said on August 4, 2012 at 7:57 pm
      Reply

      Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.

    2. Leonidas Burton said on September 4, 2023 at 4:51 am
      Reply

      I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
      http://www.google.com/saved

  2. VioletMoon said on August 16, 2023 at 5:26 pm
    Reply

    @Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!

  3. Karl said on August 17, 2023 at 10:36 pm
    Reply

    @Martin

    The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
    https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/

    Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.

  4. Anonymous said on August 25, 2023 at 11:44 am
    Reply

    Omg a badge!!!
    Some tangible reward lmao.

    It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.

  5. Scroogled said on August 25, 2023 at 10:57 pm
    Reply

    With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.

    1. lollmaoeven said on August 27, 2023 at 6:24 am
      Reply

      This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)

  6. El Duderino said on August 25, 2023 at 11:14 pm
    Reply

    Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.

    And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.

  7. John G. said on August 26, 2023 at 1:29 am
    Reply

    First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm

    For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[

  8. Kalmly said on August 26, 2023 at 4:42 pm
    Reply

    Yes. Please. Fix the comments.

  9. Kim Schmidt said on September 3, 2023 at 3:42 pm
    Reply

    With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.

    Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.

    The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.

    If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.

    And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.

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