Fiddler has joined the Telerik family | Hacker News Reader

Fiddler has joined the Telerik family

fiddler2.com

66 pointsyread27 comments

I'm surprised by the HN response -- from what Eric says, this is the first opportunity he'll have to work on Fiddler full-time. Surely that's a good thing? Even assuming Telerik will interfere with his work "a la Yahoo", he will still be able to dedicate more time to Fiddler than he'd have had in his old job.

It's not the a la yahoo, it's what happened to .Net Reflector. It left a bitter taste in many mouths. They address it directly on their blog though and repeatedly say they're not going to pull a redgate:

http://www.telerik.com/automated-testing-tools/blog/christop...

I was worried about Fiddler getting "redgated" too. Glad to see Telerik being very forward about not screwing the community. Between their free .NET MVC controls, the Kendo UI and that a few of their engineers put out top quality content via their blogs Telerik has always played nicely with the developer community. Good luck to Eric and Telerik.

I'm mixed, great for him to have the opportunity, but there is still caution ala redgate. Just in case Telerik does pull a redgate, at least there are plenty of other options now for the 80%+ use case of sniffing HTTP requests, starting with what browsers provide.

I have no idea what Telrik is like. But I do know Eric - he's incredibly committed. Fiddler was a side project for him, written during his meager free-time when not working his full-time gig as a PM at Microsoft. The fact that it's made it this far is a testament to him and his commitment to making the web a better place.

So - I have a hard time believing he's going to let Fiddler fall apart. If anything, he's finally getting an opportunity to make it his priority, and with an actual development team backing him, I'm actually excited to see how far he can push Fiddler.

tl;dr - I don't have faith in Telrik. I do, however, have faith in Eric.

Well that's gone to hell then. I've dealt with Telerik lots over the years and have nothing pleasant to say about the experience.

Can you elaborate? All I know about Telerik is that they do a lot to sponsor community podcasts and user groups.

Well RadControls as a fine example: bloated, unreliable, impossible to work with, buggy, slow, expensive.

The above may all be true, but I'm sure you'd say the same about any of the "enterprise" suites of web controls. Speaking from experience with Infragistics, I'd say the exact same things. Perhaps it's the price to pay for trying to make the "be all and end all" of control suites.

first .net reflector, not this... They say web debugger will remain free, so will be able to see http traffic from that free version? What will offer paid version?

If it's any consolation, Redgate were the ones that locked down reflector. In fact Telerik released their own free decompiler as a response to Redgate's actions (though I haven't used it - the commercial version of reflector is rather nice).

Fiddler is a wonderous tool, yet in need of some UX enhancements, so I'm hopeful that this change proves fruitful for both the free tool and whatever Telerik ends up doing to monetize the product.

Haven't used Telerik's decompiler, yet, but there are several other alternatives to Reflector: open source ILSpy and JetBrains dotPeek. Both are free, since I last checked.

The moment Telerik attempts to charge a penny for Fiddler, I'm betting you'll see alternatives spring up. Quickly.

Hopefully ones that support Linux. Fiddler is one of the few reasons to keep using a Windows VM.

There are existing alternatives, charles, burp etc but these all cost money and have an inferior UX.

Charles web debugging proxy is a similar tool, that works on OS X and Linux additionally:

http://www.charlesproxy.com/

It also costs money , which is what people seem to be worried about with fiddler.

I see.

I was wondering what the complaints re: Reflector/RedGate were, I am a big fan of their SQL Server tools, but they do cost money.

Time to backup current Fiddler binaries.

Let's hope it doesn't go the way of Reflector.

yesterday's news http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4500461

It bites when you're first but nobody notices.

Try using http://hnpickup.appspot.com/

I was wondering if submission time had something to do with it. thanks.

RIP Fiddler...

wow guys, why so negative? I firmly believe that Eric knows what he is doing and that telerik is going to keep the tool free and polished. And as someone said, if they make it paid an alternative will pop up in the matter of hours...

Because these things rarely work out. Either company takes it in wrong direction or developer now has money and gets itchy for something else. (yes, a major generalization I know) Have there been examples of OS project developers hooking on with a company and the project becomes better? May be helpful to be reminded of those in this situation.

It isn't up to Eric anymore. I wish him well, personally, but the product's fate is in the hands of Telerik.

That's good news. Fiddler is a great tool and now it will get greater.

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