Customers have been asking us to add Chrome support to HttpWatch for the last eight years or so. It’s taken much longer than we hoped, but we are excited to finally support the Chrome browser in HttpWatch 11.

Once you install HttpWatch 11 and approve the extension in Chrome you get an HttpWatch button in the toolbar:

and a context menu item:

Nearly all the features from HttpWatch for IE are available in the Chrome extension including advanced Find/Filter, customizable columns, info tips, password masking and more. Here’s a screenshot from the HttpWatch Chrome extension showing whether HTTP/2 is used and recording traffic across multiple pages:

There are few areas where we weren’t able to provide the same functionality:

• No Streams tab
• No Cache tab
• Automation API is not yet available but will be added in version 11.1
• No Render Start page event
• The HttpWatch window is always undocked from Chrome

Where possible we will address these limitations in future updates. As with previous versions there’s a free Basic edition and a paid for Professional edition allowing the easy collection of detailed log files from customers or in-house users.

We have also improved the HAR compatibility in this release – it’s now possible to save (Cache) and failing requests in a HAR log file:

Customers who purchased HttpWatch Professional 10.x on or after February 22nd 2017, or had a maintenance agreement that was active on May 22nd 2017, can use their existing license key to install version 11.x. You can check whether a free or paid upgrade to HttpWatch Professional 11.x is available by going to Help->Check For Updates.

HttpWatch shows a summary of the SSL connections used for HTTPS requests:

While this information is useful, our customers have asked for more detail about certificates, protocol versions and other aspects of the server’s configuration. There are online SSL tools that can do this but tests are often slow and cannot be used to investigate servers on local networks or in test environments.

To address these issues we have developed SSLRobot – a desktop (Mac and PC) based SSL scanning tool that quickly checks secure servers:

The tool highlights possible configuration issues that could compromise the security of a secure web server:

We’ve integrated this tool directly into HttpWatch (version 1.0.56+) so you can start a check from the SSL tab or URL context menu:

If you have a license for the current version of HttpWatch Professional you can request a free license key for SSLRobot by visiting the following page:

https://store.httpwatch.com/free-sslrobot-license/

HttpWatch added support for Firefox 2 & 3 back in 2008 and we’ve updated it to support the 39 major versions released since then.

Sadly, the last Firefox version HttpWatch will support is 40 (the one released this week, August 11, 2015). The main reason is that Firefox 41 will drop support for native extensions like HttpWatch:

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2015/05/04/dropping-support-for-binary-components/

Unfortunately, porting the HttpWatch extension to JS/XUL or using JS c-types is not feasible due to the large development effort required, the inability to maintain a low performance overhead and the limited interfaces available to the underlying Firefox web and network components.

It’s not just the dropping of binary extension support that has forced this decision. The rapid 6 week release cycle has made it increasingly difficult for developers and Firefox users to keep their extensions working with each new release. We have come to the conclusion our development time would be better spent adding more features to HttpWatch on Internet Explorer and adding new ways to sniff HTTP traffic from other browsers.

If you want to carry on using HttpWatch, for as long as possible, the best option is to use Firefox ESR version 38. It will work with HttpWatch version 10 and receive security fixes until approximately March 2016.

UPDATE: Mozilla is also deprecating the XPCOM and XUL technologies that have been the foundation of the Firefox extension system.

UPDATE: You can still Firefox 40 to test HTTP/2 with HttpWatch by downloading it from https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/40.0.3/win32/en-US/