When you visit a HTTPS site, the server must present a certificate, signed by a trusted third-party (a Certificate Authority, aka CA), vouching for the identity of the bearer. The certificate contains an expiration date, and is considered valid until that date arrives. But what if the CA later realizes that it issued the certificateContinue reading “Certificate Revocation in Microsoft Edge”
Category Archives: perf
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”
Leaky Abstractions
In the late 1990s, the Windows Shell and Internet Explorer teams introduced a bunch of brilliant and intricate designs that allowed extension of the shell and the browser to handle scenarios beyond what those built by Microsoft itself. For instance, Internet Explorer supported the notion of pluggable protocols (“What if some protocol, say, FTPS, becomesContinue reading “Leaky Abstractions”
Private Browsing Mode
Note: This blog post was originally written before the new Chromium-based Microsoft Edge was announced. As a consequence, it includes discussion of the behavior of the Legacy Microsoft Edge browser. The new Chromium-based Edge behaves largely the same way as Google Chrome. Last Update: 12 Apr 2024 InPrivate Mode was introduced in Internet Explorer 8Continue reading “Private Browsing Mode”
Going Offline with ServiceWorker
In the IE8 era, I had a brief stint as an architect on the IE team, trying to figure out a coherent strategy and a deployable set of technologies that would allow web developers to build offline-capable web applications. A few of those ideas turned into features, several turned into unimplemented patents, and a fewContinue reading “Going Offline with ServiceWorker”
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”
Working with “Big Data” in .NET
For simplicity (and because I didn’t know any better at the time), Fiddler uses plain public byte[] array fields to represent the request and response bodies. This makes working with the body data trivial for authors of extensions and FiddlerScript, but it also creates significant shortcomings. Using fields rather than properties improves performance in some scenarios,Continue reading “Working with “Big Data” in .NET”
Finding Image Bloat In Binary Files
I’ve previously talked about using PNGDistill to optimize batches of images, but in today’s quick post, I’d like to show how you can use the tool to check whether images in your software binaries are well optimized. For instance, consider Chrome. Chrome uses a lot of PNGs, all mashed together a single resources.pak file. Tip:Continue reading “Finding Image Bloat In Binary Files”
Compression Context
ZIP is a great format—it’s extremely broadly deployed, relatively simple, and supports a wide variety of use-cases pretty well. ZIP is the underlying format beneath Java (.jar) Archives, Office (docx/xlsx/pptx) files, Fiddler (.saz) Session Archive ZIP files, and many more. Even though some features (Unicode filenames, AES encryption, advanced compression engines) aren’t supported by allContinue reading “Compression Context”
Automatically Evaluating Compressibility
Fiddler’s Transformer tab has long been a simple way to examine the use of HTTP compression of web assets, especially as new compression engines (like Zopfli) and compression formats (like Brotli) arose. However, the one-Session-at-a-time design of the Transformer tab means it is cumbersome to use to evaluate the compressibility of an entire page orContinue reading “Automatically Evaluating Compressibility”
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