Category Archives: fiddler

Capturing Logs for Debugging SmartScreen

The Microsoft Edge browser makes use of a service called Microsoft Defender SmartScreen to help protect users from phishing websites and malicious downloads. The SmartScreen service integrates with a Microsoft threat intelligence service running in the cloud to quickly block discovered threats. As I explained last year, the SmartScreen service also helps reduce spurious securityContinue reading “Capturing Logs for Debugging SmartScreen”

Edge’s Super-Res Image Enhancement

One interesting feature that the Edge team is experimenting with this summer is called “SuperRes” or “Enhance Images.” This feature allows Microsoft Edge to use a Microsoft-built AI/ML service to enhance the quality of images shown within the browser. You can learn more about how the images are enhanced (and see some examples) in theContinue reading “Edge’s Super-Res Image Enhancement”

Extending Fiddler’s ImageView

Fiddler’s ImageView Inspector offers a lot of powerful functionality for inspecting images and discovering ways to shrink an image’s byte-weight without impacting its quality. Less well-known is the fact that the ImageView Inspector is very extensible, such that you can add new tools to it very simply. To do so, simply download any required executablesContinue reading “Extending Fiddler’s ImageView”

“Batteries-Included” vs “Bloated”

Fundamentals are invisible. Features are controversial. One of the few common complaints against Microsoft Edge is that “It’s bloated– there’s too much stuff in it!” A big philosophical question for designers of popular software concerns whether the product should include features that might not be useful for everyone or even a majority of users. ThereContinue reading ““Batteries-Included” vs “Bloated””

Thoughts on Impact

In this post, I talk a lot about Microsoft, but it’s not only applicable to Microsoft. It’s once again “Connect Season” at Microsoft, a biannual-ish period when Microsoft employees are tasked with filling out a document about their core priorities, key deliverables, and accomplishments over the past year, concluding with a look ahead to theirContinue reading “Thoughts on Impact”

Analyzing Network Traffic Logs (NetLog json)

Previously, I’ve described how to capture a network traffic log from Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, and applications based on Chromium or Electron. In this post, I aim to catalog some guidance for looking at these logs to help find the root cause of captured problems and otherwise make sense of the data collected. Last Update:Continue reading “Analyzing Network Traffic Logs (NetLog json)”

Firefox and Fiddler – Easier than Ever

In a world where software and systems seem to march inexorably toward complexity, I love it when things get simpler. Years ago, Firefox required non-obvious configuration changes to even send traffic to Fiddler. Eventually, Mozilla changed their default behavior on Windows to adopt the system’s proxy, meaning that Firefox would automatically use Fiddler when it was attached,Continue reading “Firefox and Fiddler – Easier than Ever”

FiddlerCore and Brotli compression

Recently, a developer asked me how to enable Brotli content-compression support in FiddlerCore applications, so that APIs like oSession.GetResponseBodyAsString() work properly when the entity body has been compressed using brotli. Right now, support requires two steps: Put brotli.exe (installed by Fiddler or off Github) into a Tools subfolder of the folder containing your application’s executable. Ensure that theContinue reading “FiddlerCore and Brotli compression”