Technofriends

As someone who works extensively in the field of web application performance and optimization, its very important for me and for those who work in the same field (or are interested in learning more about Web Performance, creating high performance websites and application, security of the web applications etc) to be able to trace the HTTP request and response headers.

While there do exist tools like Fiddler, HTTP Watch, Live HTTP Header ( Firefox add-on), there are moments when you want to know the HTTP Headers from a particular computer which doesn’t have these specific debugging softwares installed on them. For example, you are remotely located and don’t have access to Fiddler or any of the specific HTTP Request and Response debugging software listed above, but still wish to get a handle on the HTTP Request and Response headers exchanged between the client and the server. To navigate through such situations, an interesting online tool Web-Sniffer can be of use.

Web-Sniffer is a free to use, no download or signup required application which allows you to view request and response header of a HTTP connection and HTML source online.

Features available with Web-Sniffer

• Support for various user agents

• Allows you to witch between HTTP/1.1 and HTTP/1.0

• Allows you to test If-Modified-Since and If-Match headers

• Also supports WWW-Authenticate

• URL may also be an Internationalized Domain Names (IDN)

• Supports secure connections (HTTPS).

In order to get started, navigate your browser to Web-Sniffer.net and enter the URL for which you wish to get HTTP Request and Response Headers. Select appropriate checkbox and also select the user-agent which you wish to send in the HTTP Request. Press Submit, once you are done. As a result, you will be shown a HTTP Request and Response header flow and the body of the response.

While, you might not find it useful to use tools like Web-Sniffer on a daily basis, but they are certainly crucial for one of those moments when you really need an online interface.

Also Read: [How-To] Measure Performance Of Your Website With Apache Bench

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