Bypass Fiddler Url's

[mellamokb]

Hi,

I'm having a lot of trouble with the Fiddler ByPass Url feature and wonder if there's a better approach.  Over time I've put together a list of about 150 domains that I want to leave out of my Fiddler sessions, because they're common sites that I visit a lot (or ad sites) and don't care to capture.  But I still want to capture everything else.

I've put the entries in "Bypass Fiddler for URLs that start with:" box in Fiddler Options -> Connections tab, but I can't seem to get it to work correctly anymore.  Often it ignores most of my url's, and I've tried entering in lots of different formats.  Is it possible this feature could be made more robust, i.e., accept input as line-terminated list, or comma-separated, or similar formats?  I think line-terminated would be the best so it's easy to read through the list, i.e.,

<-loopback>

*.addthis.com

*.clearspring.com

*.doubleclick.net

etc.

Is there a better preferred way to leave out sessions?  Should I handle it with a script in customRules.js file?

Thanks!

~ mellamokb

[mellamokb]

For instance, I have *.stackoverflow.com currently in the list, and it is still showing traffic.  But urls appearing before and after that entry in the bypass list do get filtered properly.

In fact, I think I may have just figured it out.  Apparently *.stackoverflow.com doesn't filter out if there is no subdomain at all, for instance "stackoverflow.com/".  Not very intuitive to me, because I really don't want have to put both "stackoverflow.com;*.stackoverflow.com" for every single domain I want to filter out...

[EricLaw]

Let's step back a bit. The feature Bypass Fiddler for URLs that start with is implemented by Internet Explorer / WinINET, not by Fiddler itself. The text that you put in the Fiddler settings box is simply set as the text found at Tools > Internet Options > Connections > LAN Settings > Advanced > Do not use proxy server for URLs starting with. As a consequence, your settings here have no effect on Firefox or other applications that don't use the IE/WinINET proxy settings.

 

If your goal is to simply hide traffic from Fiddler's list, use the Hide the following hosts option at the top of the Filters tab. You can enter your list using comma, semicolon, CRLF, tab, or spaces as the delimiters. To block an entire domain and all of its subdomains, use e.g. *stackoverflow.com.

[mellamokb]

Wow, that is exactly what I was looking for!  Thanks!  This will help a lot :)

Regards,

~mellamokb

[mellamokb]

OK. I may have not quite made myself clear.  The filter is great for a large majority of url's that are just noise in my Fiddler output, and it doesn't affect anything whether they are captured or not.

However, I do actually want to skip Fiddler altogether for some url's.  For instance, LogMeIn does not work correctly if the traffic is being captured by Fiddler.  Also, sites like youtube and Pandora do goofy stuff like skipping or erroring out halfway through when Fiddler is involved.  So simply hiding the url from the output list is not quite enough.  I want certain domain names to bypass Fiddler completely and not even be captured in the first place.  Is putting those few exceptions in "Bypass Fiddler for URLs that start with" my best option?

Thanks again!

[EricLaw]

I have no problem at all with running either Youtube or Pandora through Fiddler and I do so every day (in the case of Pandora, all day long).

 

What problem specifically do you have with "LogMeIn"?

 

If you want WinINET not to send certain traffic to Fiddler, then yes, "Bypass Fiddler for URLs that start with" is the way to do that. But, as I said above, this isn't a Fiddler feature, this is a WinINET/IE feature, and hence you have to specify your urls using the format expected by that feature (see IE's Tools > Internet Options > Connection > LAN Settings > Advanced).

[mellamokb]

Just to followup, I am finding that Youtube, Pandora, and logmein are indeed working fine with Fiddler running, so I'm not sure what the issue was.

I did discover today that if I leave Pandora open for a long time (say 2-3 hours) while paused with Fiddler running, when I come back to unpause, it will usually finish the song fine but generate an error when attempting to load the next song and require Pandora to be reloaded.  I don't think it's a session issue because I can typically just refresh the page and it works fine (I have the setting enabled to always keep me logged in).  This is on my office computer - on my home computer, I also have Pandora up all the time, and I have noticed that even if I leave it paused overnight, when I come back and resume it works just fine.  The only major difference in the two cases is that I run Fiddler on my office computer 24/7, but not on my home computer.

Maybe there's a clue to something about behavior with long-running session and Fiddler?