New Article! - One Tab To Rule Them All - Discussion

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Hi all,

We’ve just released a new article from @restertest called One Tab To Rule Them All: The Developer Tools Network Tab.

Ioan is sharing some useful insights into the Network tab of Dev tools which is a personal favourite tool of mine when I’m testing Web applications. But what about you? Is the Network tab your favourite as well? Or do you like to use other tabs in Dev tools more? Perhaps you have other tools entirely that you like to use?

I know for a fact that @friendlytester is a little bit obsessed about Charles proxy for example. He loves that tool!

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The network is what I use 60% of the time, other than the Elements tab from time to time - when looking into visual bugs and Console to look for any insightful error messages and/or warnings. All parts of dev tools can be useful occasionally, but other than the ones I mentioned Lighthouse is also very useful to get a pretty decent insight into your site’s performance, accessibility, SEO, etc.

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@mirza - Just as a curiosity did you know all the nice usages that are in the article?

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Most not all, I didn’t notice before that you could stimulate blocked requests, seems like a handy feature!

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All forum replies are shown on the article as comments, neat! :smiley:

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Personally, I often prefer using Burp Suite. My reasons:

  • it’s a bit more readable than Devtools
  • it also shows redirected requests (Devtools don’t show them properly for some reason)
  • it has the option to edit requests and responses, or (using the HTTP Mock plugin) mock them entirely. That’s very handy when I need to test how the frontend would handle backend responses that are hard or impossible to evoke from the actual backend.
  • I can also use it for backend testing - I run the backend service locally, tell it to proxy its requests through Burp and then I can see and edit its requests to other backend services.

But yeah, if I’m already in Chrome and just need to quickly check something, I do use Devtools for that - it would be a bit of a hassle to open Burp, then the inbuilt Chromium browser and navigate to the place I need to check.

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Saw that as well :slight_smile:
It is a nice feature.
Or is it a bug?

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Feature, well it’s meant to be :slight_smile:

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Great article! I agree with you that the network tab is really underrated - I also love being able to see how much time each request took, and the order that the requests are firing in - really cool stuff. Didn’t know about the ability to copy the curl for a request, that is really awesome.

One thing I wanted to mention is that the “Copy request” screenshot is displaying under the “Simulating Blocked Requests” section, and the “Simulate Blocked Requests” screenshot is displaying under the “Copying And Re-using Requests” section, think they just need to be swapped with each other - just a little QA on the article :smile:

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Thanks for spotting this, @kilburg. We’ve fixed the problem. :+1:t2:

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