Answered

No decode button (Mac)

Hi. I've been struggling to decode https traffic in fiddler everywhere and realize the "decode" button in the live traffic toolbar is absent, as seen below (the decode button should be at the left of the "filter" button.


image



I have successfully installed the fiddler root certificate and activated https capture in settings, all I need is the decode button to show up and be active. 


I have found no reported cases of the button missing.


Any help would be greatly appreciated. 


Macbook Pro 13" 2015 / Mac OS Catalina 10.15.7 / Fiddler Everywhere v1.4.1


Best Answer

Hello  Jonathanrogez,



The latest version of the Fiddler Everywhere application removed the Decode button from the Live Traffic toolbar. 


The change is behavioral as now all inspectors except for the Raw inspector will decode an encoded/compressed content. The Raw inspector is the place where, by default, the content will be as is. Also, in the Raw inspector, you will find the old Decode toggle button, which will allow you to switch between decoded and encoded content (for the Raw inspector only). The above said, notice that the sessions are saved as is due to performance optimizations,. They will be decoded only when a specific Inspector is selected (again, with the Raw inspector as an exception).


The team will greatly appreciate your feedback on that change in the UI & UX. Let us know if you need further information about that feature or face some troubles or challenges with the new behavior.


Answer

Hello  Jonathanrogez,



The latest version of the Fiddler Everywhere application removed the Decode button from the Live Traffic toolbar. 


The change is behavioral as now all inspectors except for the Raw inspector will decode an encoded/compressed content. The Raw inspector is the place where, by default, the content will be as is. Also, in the Raw inspector, you will find the old Decode toggle button, which will allow you to switch between decoded and encoded content (for the Raw inspector only). The above said, notice that the sessions are saved as is due to performance optimizations,. They will be decoded only when a specific Inspector is selected (again, with the Raw inspector as an exception).


The team will greatly appreciate your feedback on that change in the UI & UX. Let us know if you need further information about that feature or face some troubles or challenges with the new behavior.

Thanks, Nick, for the very prompt and detailed response. I was indeed checking the "raw" tab in responses and was puzzled as to why what I saw was still encoded. Thanks to you, I have located the decode button in the "raw" tab. 

For me, personally, I was quite confused by the change. Also, I'm not sure why the toggle appears unavailable on some responses (see below, the "decode" button is greyed out and I can't decode the raw response - any idea why). But I'm guessing there must have been serious performance issues that justify the change.

I'll get used to it though!  Please consider updating the documentation (I'm sure you have it on your radar). 

Thanks again for helping!

Thanks for the feedback! The whole documentation is thoroughly updated as we speak.


Regarding your case - It looks like that the session in the screenshot is an image. You could use the Preview inspector to see the rendered image. The Raw inspector is greyed out as it is showing the raw content. Still, there is probably no Content-Encoding used, so there is nothing to decode (again, I suspect there is a Content-Type which indicates that you need to load an image with is done by the Preview inspector).