Over the years, my Live HTTP Headers Equivalent for IE post has pretty consistently gotten a few hits a month. Maybe that is because Google still ranks it #2 behind a StackOverflow post from 2010. I decided to update it since the post is from 2007 and what is available has changed.

The original issue was end users having a problem downloading office files from our web site. The issue only happened in IE, so we could not get them to look at headers using Firefox to diagnose the problem. The users did not want to use Firefox or maybe could not at work environments not allowing them to install alternative browsers.

Maybe - Free

Sorted in order I’d probably recommend.

1. F12 Developer Tools (for Edge; IE Developer Tools) – looks very much like the Web Developer tools for Firefox and Chrome. The Network tab captures which pages are taking forever to load. Click on a specific request displays the request and response headers.
2. iehttpheaders – Dunno if much has changed, but this was the better of the two from the original 2007 post.

No Way - Free

These are too scary or complicated to be something I would want to have to walk end users through using. Fine for power users, but not my purpose.

• Fiddler – disappointed the logo is not a crab. Listens in the background and captures all browsers. All our stuff has encrypted traffic which Fiddler can only see by installing a CA called DO_NOT_TRUST, which there is no way I am going to ask clients to do.
• Wireshark – probably okay for a power user, but not most people in the general public.

No Way – Paid

Not really useful for my purposes because this was about having end users install something to help us figure out the source of their trouble.

• DebugBar HTTPTab – Looks viable, but it is essentially the same as the F12 Developer Tools. Has issues with other integrations.
• HTTP Debugger – Sniffs all HTTP traffic.
• HttpWatch – free version only works with well known sites. Have to get paid version to see our stuff.
• HTTP Analyzer – trial version. Has a warning the technology it uses likely causes antivirus software to think it is malicious software. Difficult to explain to users, hey, use this thing your computer will likely complain is a virus.
• IEWatch – IE plugin. Ancient and has not been actively developed in 9 years. Newest OS reported to support is Windows Vista, so it might have issues with more recent ones like 8 and 10?