Fiddling with Fiddler

Fiddler is a very useful tool for capturing network traffic. I use to primarily to debug issues with web servers. It has a simple to use two pane interface. The left pane will list all requests and the right pane will show associated data for the selected request in the left pane.

Fiddler allows you to see request data such as:
1) HTTP Request headers
2) Request body
3) Response headers
4)  Response body

It has options to see the raw data as is or to shown in user-friendly format. It automatically decrypts base 64 encoding and has support for gzip/deflate protocols as well.

One feature I really like is the cloning feature. This feature allows you to clone an existing logged request, make modifications to be and execute it as a browser would do. This can be very useful to debug and test request/response issues.

Fiddler supports IE, Firefox and Chrome. I haven’t tested it in Safari or Opera yet.

A must have for all web developers and network engineers.