Tag Archives: HttpWatch

HttpWatch 8.4: Supports Firefox 14 and Selenium

July 17, 2012

The latest update to HttpWatch adds support for Firefox 14 and includes a new AttachByTitle method on the Controller automation class: Previously, it wasn’t possible to attach HttpWatch to instance of IE created by the Selenium browser automation framework because Selenium doesn’t provide access to the IE’s IWebBrowser2 interface. The new AttachByTitle method makes it possible to attach HttpWatch to any instance of IE or Firefox so long as the page has a unique title. For example, here’s the sample code included with HttpWatch 8.4 that demonstrates how to use a unique page title with Selenium: // Use Selenium to … Continue reading →

Using HttpWatch and WatiN 2.1

June 25, 2012

In a previous post we described how to interact with a web page using WatiN 1.3 while recording HTTP/HTTPS traffic in HttpWatch. It was a popular post, used by many customers to build automated web page tests that used HttpWatch to provide performance metrics, check for HTTP level errors and to look for opportunities to improve performance. Since then, WatiN 2.1 has been released providing significant improvements and the ability to interact with Firefox 3.6 as well as Internet Explorer. Unfortunately, a change in the WatiN assembly caused a type conflict with HttpWatch over the definition of IE’s IWebBrowser2 type. … Continue reading →

SPDY Content Compression – How Should it Work?

June 7, 2012

One of the first things we noticed when using HttpWatch in Firefox 13 was that Google servers do not compress content in SPDY responses: HTTP compression is usually the most important optimization technique a site can use because it drastically reduces the download size of textual resources such as HTML. It therefore seems surprising that the Google servers do not use it with SPDY responses to Firefox. In fact, the Google home page tries to determine if the browser supports compression by downloading a gzip compressed javascript file to see if it executes. You can see the compression test URL highlighted in … Continue reading →