Deploy360 25 January 2014

Weekend Project: Add IPvFoo or IPvFox To Your Web Browser To See What Is IPv6

By Dan YorkDirector, Internet Technology

IPvFoxHere’s a quick project for you that will quickly enable you to see what sites work over IPv6 – and what sites don’t! If you use either Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox as your web browser you can add an “extension” or “add-on” that helpfully adds an icon to the location bar in your browser, as shown in the image with this post. You can get them at these links:

As we wrote about in the past, the cool part about these add-ons is that they enable you to see what parts of your website are NOT working with IPv6.  For instance, in preparing this post I noticed that our Deploy360 site is no longer showing only a “6” like it used to do a few weeks ago.   By clicking on that icon in the location bar, I saw this:

Detail of the IPvFox plugin

This clues me in to the fact that when I recently installed the JetPack plugin for WordPress I wound up using two services that are only available over IPv4. 🙁  Given that we want this site to be available to people on IPv6-only networks, now it’s time for me to go off and file bug reports with those sites to indicate that they are not reachable over IPv6.  (Either that or turn off the features that use IPv4, but bug reports are a critical way for people to get more attention to the need to be accessible over IPv6!)

Anyway, I’ve installed these extensions and add-ons into all my instances of Chrome or Firefox and it’s great now to see the places where I can get IPv6 connectivity!

Give it a try!

P.S. This assumes, of course, that you have IPv6 connectivity… if you do not have IPv6 these add-ons won’t be of much help. But hey, if you don’t have IPv6, maybe now is a good time to try setting up an IPv6 tunnel so that you can try these add-ons out!  

Disclaimer: Viewpoints expressed in this post are those of the author and may or may not reflect official Internet Society positions.

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