What You Need To Know About Fiddler Web Debugger Tool

Debugging the traffic flowing from the mobile devices, computers, and Mac or Linux systems is imperative to ensure stringent monitoring of data. In this regard, Fiddler has emerged as a potential web debugging tool that records the traffic between a machine and the internet.It captures this traffic for inspecting outgoing and incoming data.

This, in turn, helps to alter the HTTP requests before they reach a browser.

What Is Fiddler?

Fiddler software was developed in the year 2003 by Eric Lawrence and was acquired by Telerik in 2012. It is a free debugging proxy that uses a strong event-based scripting subsystem that can be extended by using any Framework. It ensures a proper transfer of cookies, cache, and headers from client side to server side and vice versa. It universally supports all the frameworks, browsers, and platforms. It addresses multiple needs of a user for testing and diagnosing a website before accessing it. Hence, it is stacked with features that allow its working as a HTTP proxy server.

The Working of Fiddler:

On starting Fiddler, the Windows Internet or WinINet saves the current proxy settings and then, transforms it to work as a proxy for HTTP traffic. In order to log this activity, it adds itself to WinINet for monitoring the reports and requests in the real-time. Apart from recording the data, it also fiddles with the traffic during its transmission. It is designed to serve dual purposes of debugging and proxy setting. It logs data from the applications supporting proxy. The data overload results in a swarming interface but the same is well-organized in this tool.

The Exceptional Features of Fiddler Tool:

The client-side issues can be resolved by this software that makes an offline copy of a site and creates offline images of the browser history. It possesses some of the strongest features that include:

Decompressing Web Sessions:

The transmission of bytes between client and server can be decreased tremendously by using HTTP compression. It results in nearly 50% savings for JavaScript, XML, HTML, and CSS. Along with this, it also leads to manipulation of web sessions. Hence, you can set a division to hold the processing of the sessions and also alter the requests or responses.

Security Testing of Web Applications:

By automating SSL decryption, Fiddler helps in security testing of web applications. It uses man-in-the-middle decryption techniques for displaying and modifying the HTTPS requests.

Traffic Recording:

Fiddler logs the traffic flowing between your computer and the internet. You can debug traffic from any application supporting proxy. Such applications include browsers like Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, etc. It enables recording of HTTP/S traffic along with its archiving and playback. You can also filter this data and hide the successful image and web requests.

Effective Performance Testing:

Fiddler helps in setting a timeline for performance analysis. Also, it can simulate HTTP compression by allowing top add or remove HTTP-based coding from requests. By using HTTP caching, it reduces the roundtrips and stores responses for later use. This tool has an efficient mechanism for profiling an application’s performance using lesser images, simplifying layout, and extracting blocks of scripts into a single JavaScript.

Easy Customizations:

You can develop different extensions in Fiddler using any .NET language. It has an impressive extensibility model that enables this feature.

As a matter of fact, Fiddler is an exceptional choice for diagnosing and testing of websites and applications. At Infognana, we offer software development services including web debugging using Fiddler.