I'm not sure if this is the right forum (if there's a better forum elsewhere, then I would be grateful for any pointers), but anyway: I am using Firefox 2.0.0.14 on Ubuntu 7.10 for day-to-day graphical webbrowsing. I sometimes find that some websites take a long time to answer certain requests because it appears that the web server is not answering the query quickly enough, or there is some script/ad/site/image that resides on a separate server hotlinked or embedded, and that separate server is not answering quickly enough. Some ads or tracking servers in particular can be sluggish to load. I would like to find a way to watch what images/files/objects are currently being loaded while a webpage loads. So I guess I am looking for some sort of Firefox Add-on that provides a tab/window where I can see what activity is really taking place "behind the scenes". Sadly, my googling was unsuccessful. Can anyone point me to any such Add-on or a similarly suitable solution?
I'm not sure if this will work for you, but check out the Firebug addon. The webpage says:
"You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page..." (emphasis mine.) https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1843
I do believe that according to this, Firebug is supposed to be able to do what I'm searching for.
However, in the real world, it doesn't quite work as well, because while it will show what took how long after the page (or the respective page element) has finished loading, it does not reliably show what it's stuck at while it's still loading.
This image shows archive.org having problems (archive.org isn't the most reliable of websites, in my experience). The page is still loading, but Firebug doesn't show what specific element/file is stalling things:
The second below screenshot shows the same page a minute or so later, after archive.org has finished loading. (The page hasn't actually loaded successfully, but that's archive.org's problem, not Firebug's. Firebug is supposed to be able to help pinpointing the problem.) It now turns out that index.php was at fault -- mind you, index.php showed as (instantly) fully loaded in the earlier screenshot:
So... does anyone know another solution that works better? Or a way to make Firebug work as intended?
PS: In case you're wondering, I get the same results with AdBlock Plus turned off, maybe a bit quicker, but that's all.
there is also NoScript https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722 which blocks most ads (flash or other plugins if configured correctly) and stops all scripts from executing inside a page, that makes my browsing wayyyy faster!
Outside of Firefox, you could watch the traffic in a packet sniffer, if it's your personal workstation. The old workhorse tcpdump is a bit unwieldy, modern graphical tools like Wireshark may be more friendy at least for getting a feel for what you really want to look for; once you know that, you can go back and script tcpdump and create your own little custom application on top of it to show what's pending and how long things are taking. (If you go down this route, I'd really like to try it out!)
Thanks very much for the lighthttpheaders link. Archive.org currently isn't slow, and I obviously need to run across a slow responding website to see if it does exactly what I'm looking for, but in any event lighthttpheaders is a brilliant tool that I'm definitely going to use, so again thanks a bunch!
