Examine http response headers in IE8

Question

I'm looking for an ie8-addon that displays the http headers like firebug or httpliveheaders do. Any advice is appreciated.

edit: I may be blind but it seems as if the built-in developer tools (F12) do not show the http headers.

Solution 1

You might be looking for Fiddler2

Fiddler is a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language.

Fiddler is freeware and can debug traffic from virtually any application, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and thousands more.

Solution 2

If you want to view HTTP headers in your IE I recommend using DebugBar.
I've tested it with IE8 and it was working with no problems. It has also few other useful features like validating HTML or viewing cookies.

However I see two problems with this tool:

• for personal use it is for free, otherwise you have to pay.
• dynaTrace had some compatibility issues with DebugBar.

Solution 3

Not a full answer, but a step in the right direction:

In http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2010/04/22/ie9-developer-tools-network-tab.aspx it says:

The [IE9] developer tools include some new capabilities and improvements over the tools in IE8:

A new tab for inspecting network traffic.

So inspecting network traffic is impossible in IE8 Developer Tools. You'll need to install something else. See the other answers for final solutions.

Solution 4

Skip IE, use curl.

This command will output the headers for google.com as if they were requested by IE8:

curl -s -A="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0)" -D - -o /dev/null http://www.google.com

The options used are as follows:

• -s silent mode, so it doesn't show the progress meter.
• -A=... specify the user agent you want to use (the example was IE8 on XP).
• -D - dump header, the dash specifies STDOUT.
• -o /dev/null redirects the body of the response, so you don't see the html.
• finally, the url you want to test.

You should see something like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2013 15:35:22 GMT
Expires: -1
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
...

Solution 5

Since there isn't something built into IE 8 for this, an alternative is to find a standalone copy of wget for Windows - like http://users.ugent.be/~bpuype/wget/.

wget -S <url> will show you the headers (and leave behind a html file, which you can further view or remove). This seems a bit more lightweight than the Fiddler2 method.

View more solutions

Comments

[VolkerK]

Works like a charm. For no good reason (except being a creature of habit) I would like this to be "within" IE ...but "you can't always get what you want" ;-)

[Steven Richards]

Fiddler is a great tool. I highly recommend it.

[scunliffe]

Fiddler is great but Mozilla Firefox traffic does not go through wininet by default IIRC. You can enable it by routing through a proxy though.

[VolkerK]

fiddler2 installed a hook-addon in my firefox, which works fine... even though I don't need it (yet).

[ken]

The IE8 dev tools contain no such mechanism to inspect network traffic of any sort.

[bobobobo]

I WAS looking for EXACTLY fiddler 2 :D

[VolkerK]

Recently there has been a dotnetrocks show wit Eric Lawrence on Fiddler, dotnetrocks.com/default.aspx?showNum=509

[Niall Connaughton]

The developer tool for IE9 does now include a network tab with this information.

[ripper234]

Wow, I heard about Fiddler for some time, just now I bothered to try it out and I never imagined that ItWillJustWork! Zero config required.

[Xonatron]

What about a solution if we can only use the IE8 Developer Tools (no permissions to install additional software)?

[Xonatron]

@ken, is this true? The IE8 developer tools cannot be used to inspect network traffic at all? There's no way to see if files didn't load or loaded slow? This is what I need and I am unfortunately stuck with IE8 Dev Tools as I do not have permission to install more software (on the systems I am inspecting).

[ken]

Yup, the Network tab of the tools was only added in IE 9. An alternative would be to use the Fiddler IE add-on (which is developed by a guy on the IE team). You can get it at: fiddler2.com/fiddler2

[VolkerK]

That is so, but curl doesn't execute all those fancy ajax requests ;-)

[Orbling]

For reference to anyone trying to find this feature on IE9+, use the Network tab in Developer Tools, start capturing and access whatever you wish, then find the request entry on the summary view, and hit Go to detailed view, this will bring up more tabs, the Response headers tab has the desired content.

[Adam Chwedyk]

@SuperUberDuper there is HTTP tab in DebugBar: my-debugbar.com/wiki/Doc/HTTPTab