Comments on: Har Har! One archive for Web performance and beyond; Implemented in Firebug and HttpWatch

By: souders

souders — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 18:35:38 +0000

@tsonev hits the nail on the head - this is about providing a way for people to work together regardless of which tool they choose. @leptons: I agree - Firebug Net Panel can be inaccurate for web pages that have intensive JavaScript - the page's JavaScript can mess up Net Panel's results. In practice, however, I rarely encounter this situation. Since I use Firebug so much, I use Net Panel frequently. One downside of Fiddler is that it's a proxy so it alters the browser behavior. (See Roundup on Parallel Connections.) @sovtek: I review a bunch of packet sniffers in Even Faster Web Sites: AOL Pagetest, WebPagetest, VRTA, Fiddler, Charles, Wireshark, and IBM Page Detailer. The key is - how many of these will adopt HAR? Honza pointed out that DebugBar has already added HAR support. @blepore: Most pages have a consistent performance profile. There are always some variabilities, but when doing performance analysis a single capture is often representative. The ability to save this, share it, and recall it later is huge.

By: olivvv

olivvv — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:00:56 +0000

@tsonev
excepted that export is not available in the free edition.

By: mdmadph

mdmadph — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:19:51 +0000

Would love to try HttpWatch — don’t want to spend $395 on it. :P

By: blepore

blepore — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:07:02 +0000

Maybe it’s just the fact that my morning coffee hasn’t kicked in yet, but I’m not creative really seeing much benefit here.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a fan of creating a standard for anything like this, but I just don’t see many of my clients being comfortable with running the NET panel all the time just on the off chance something might happen. Most of my clients can’t reproduce something in the first place. If they could I would able able to reproduce and life would work out.

Is it a useful performance metric, or is this primarily meant for debugging?

By: sfoster

sfoster — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 13:02:40 +0000

This is great news. I’ve wanted something similar to export sessions from Charles/Fiddler/Firebug/HTTPWatch/whatever and round-trip this data between the various tools we use. Having a standard format will make it much easier to conduct arbitrary/custom analysis, rendering and reporting to highlight the particular thing you’re interested in.

By: simon000666

simon000666 — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 09:11:39 +0000

@leptons – Fiddler being a proxy is a bad thing as it means it alters browsers behaviour so it doesn’t actually give you a true representation of how you page/HTTP requests would handle over a real life connection.

By: tsonev

tsonev — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 05:39:38 +0000

@leptons – Indeed Fiddler is a great tool, but this article is not about any single tool. Having a common format for HTTP logging will be a great addition to all such tools.

Imagine this – customer X is having a problem with your site that you can’t reproduce. Let’s say he’s running a Mac. With HAR widely adopted you can give him a few simple instructions and he’ll send you a detailed log in no time.

By: sovtek

sovtek — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:13:48 +0000

Too bad it is only on windows. Any mac equiv?

By: leptons

leptons — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 22:27:13 +0000

I use firebug religiously but I NEVER use it’s built-in Http debugging tools.

Fiddler is far superior and works with ALL browsers so I can debug http traffic across all browsers (and all platforms – its a proxy). Fiddler does so many things that Firebug does not and probably won’t ever do with HTTP traffic (reverse-proxy, auto-responder, and so much more). And it also includes a format for archiving the traffic, much like this article is talking about. IMO, Fiddler is simply the best tool for the job of analyzing HTTP traffic.