Examine http response headers in IE8

Question

I'm looking for an ie8-addon that displays the http headers like firebug or httpliveheaders do. Any advice is appreciated.

edit: I may be blind but it seems as if the built-in developer tools (F12) do not show the http headers.

Answer 1

IE8 comes with a developer tool, http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd565628(VS.85).aspx

Answer 2

Skip IE, use curl.

This command will output the headers for google.com as if they were requested by IE8:

curl -s -A="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0)" -D - -o /dev/null http://www.google.com

The options used are as follows:

• -s silent mode, so it doesn't show the progress meter.
• -A=... specify the user agent you want to use (the example was IE8 on XP).
• -D - dump header, the dash specifies STDOUT.
• -o /dev/null redirects the body of the response, so you don't see the html.
• finally, the url you want to test.

You should see something like this:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2013 15:35:22 GMT
Expires: -1
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0
...

Answer 3

You might be looking for Fiddler2

Fiddler is a Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet. Fiddler allows you to inspect all HTTP(S) traffic, set breakpoints, and "fiddle" with incoming or outgoing data. Fiddler includes a powerful event-based scripting subsystem, and can be extended using any .NET language.

Fiddler is freeware and can debug traffic from virtually any application, including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, and thousands more.