Comments on: Production JavaScript Debugging

By: Abbas

Abbas — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 16:41:54 +0000

Thanks much on this wonderful piece! It has saved hours of many folks with whom I shared this info.

By: Eric Lawrence

Eric Lawrence — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 21:09:06 +0000

I should probably mention (since folks are still going to this post) that Fiddler now includes a Firefox add-on (called FiddlerHook). Manual configuration of Firefox’s proxy settings is no longer required; simply use the status bar panel to attach/detach from Fiddler.

By: dev2sec

dev2sec — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:14:45 +0000

When I switched to infosec (webappsec) from s/w dev several months ago, I was pleasantly surprised that there are a few mature man-in-the-middle proxies that can do what Fiddler can, namely: WebScarab, Paros, burp. All are java based, and very much popular in real webapp vulnerability assessment activities by the actual hacker teams, ‘ethical’ or not. Try it, you might find them useful even for development.

By: David C-L

David C-L — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 11:09:21 +0000

Fiddler comes with an “automatic proxy configuration” file. Fiddler rewrites this file when it opens and closes, so that it routes traffic through Fiddler when Fiddler is running, but doesn’t reference Fiddler when Fiddler is not running. Using this file is a much easier way to configure firefox to use fiddler, as you can configure it once and then just click “reload” when you want to change configurations.

By: Angela

Angela — Sun, 29 Jun 2008 05:44:15 +0000

Thanks to those who suggested Charles–I’m giving it a whirl on my personal machine and it looks quite robust!

Really funky icon though.

By: Satyam

Satyam — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 21:03:56 +0000

Wireshark has a Mac OS/X version, or so it says. Sorry, I'm not a Mac person.

By: Niko Ni

Niko Ni — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 18:23:36 +0000

I like ‘Charles Web Debugging Proxy’ more than Fiddler, it’s really powerful and cross-platform…

By: Jonathan Aquino

Jonathan Aquino — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 03:56:57 +0000

I haven’t tried it much, but the Charles Proxy is similar to Fiddler, and works on Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux.

By: Uriah Carpenter

Uriah Carpenter — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 01:49:05 +0000

The shareware application Charles is a full featured proxy-based web debugging tool. Written in Java, Charles runs the same on Mac OS X and Linux as it does Windows. Charles feature set is very similar to Fiddler's with some neat additions including native AMF decoding, DNS spoofing (no more etc/hosts file editing!), bandwidth throttling, automatic browser proxy configuration, and a built-in reverse proxy server to just name a few additional features. I highly recommend Charles as it has saved me countless hours by quickly diagnosing tricky HTTP issues like multiple 301/302 redirects and cross-domain Flash problems. It's well worth the shareware registration cost.

By: Angela

Angela — Sat, 28 Jun 2008 01:46:58 +0000

Fiddler! Funny, I just featured it on a recent post myself, and I did find out about Fiddler from a fellow webdev at Y!. I use it on my windows test machine, and have been looking for a Mac OSX version as well. I took a look at paros which should be cross-platform (seeing as it's Java) and looks like it can do somewhat the same things, but it wouldn't work for me.