Today a colleague of mine referred me to a wonderful Mozilla Firefox (Windows / Mac) plugin called HttpWatch.
HttpWatch is an HTTP sniffer for IE, Firefox, iPhone & iPad that provides new insights into how your website loads and performs.
The plugin is quite simple it shows you all requests from your Browser to remote server with plenty of Debug information (on the fly). You can see exactly the Commands sent over the HTTP protocol as well as returned request status responce from Web Server (i.e. 200, 300, 400). By knowing the status returned by webserver you can debug odd problems with website authentication as well as oddities caused by proxies you don't know about. Besides showing responce returned on web requests HttpWatch shows also hand-shake of session ID variables. This makes the plugin precious for Web developers and System Administrators working in Web & Middleware (Linux / Windows based Web Hosting companies) etc.
HttpWatch is also a must have plugin for anyone looking to optimize a website for speed or for fixingwebsite responce time bottleneck issues. The size of plugin is quite big as of time of writting about 18.2 Megabytes. HttpWatch comes with separate app installer like any other stand alone Windows application. Unfortunately Httpwatch does not have a version for GNU / Linux. Linux users could use HTTPFox, Google Chrome Developer tools or
Firebug.
Once you have plugin installed to check what's happening with a website access in (Firefox) select Tools -> HttpWatch. You will get a bottom screen new window with deug info.
Here is list of some of the many things for which plugin is useful;
- Records HTTP
- Decrypts HTTPS Traffic
- Integrates with Internet Explorer & Firefox
- Supports the SPDY Protocol in Firefox
- Standalone Log File Viewer
- Summary of Recorded Traffic
- Grouping of Requests by Page
- Collect Log Files From Your Customers
- Request Level Time Charts
- Real-Time Page Level Time Charts
- Page Events
- Detects Potential Problems
- Customizable Data Columns
- Data Tips
- Automation Support
- Advanced Filtering
- Millisecond Level Timing
- HTTP Compression
- Network Level Performance Data
- Extended Cookie Information
- Shows Interaction with Browser Cache
- Raw HTTP Streams
- Export Data to CSV, HAR and XML
- Import HAR files
- Customizable CSV Export
- Keyboard Accelerators
- Access to Cached and Downloaded Content
- Accurately Records Requests and Responses
- Automatic Recording and Saving
Finally HttpWatch is a plugin to have next to Yahoo's YSlow, Fasterfox , FireBug and Firefox's Web Developer plugin
