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What does WhatHeaders.com do?

WhatHeaders.com is mainly intended for mobile web developers and designers. It tells you some useful information about a (mobile) web browser, or other HTTP client. Specifically, it can tell you exactly what headers are sent on an HTTP GET rquest, and the protocol version used. You can conveniently have all this info emailed to you.

Why is it useful?

It provides an easy way to find out exactly what headers a particular device and browser send with an HTTP GET request. This is sometimes very useful info, and can be difficult to find out any other way. Emailing it to yourself is a convenient way to get the data off of the mobile browser's screen.

By using WhatHeaders.com, you are also helping to create a public-domain database of mobile device information. More details below.

Why do people care about this mobile device information?

There are vast differences in web browsers across different mobile devices and platforms - enough to make Firefox 3.6, IE 6 (yes, six), and Safari all seem identical in comparison! Getting accurate technical documentation for a particular mobile browser is usually very hard. WhatHeaders.com provides an easy, quick way to independently measure the HTTP request headers, for any internet-capable device.

(Incidentally, that is why this site's presentation is so sparse: a "lowest common denominator" styling that works well on almost any mobile browser.)

Public Domain Mobile Device Database

The higher purpose of WhatHeaders.com is to create a freely available data set: the HTTP request headers sent by the world's thousands of different mobile-device browsers. This mobile ecosystem information is potentially useful to anyone involved with mobile web development and design.

When you use WhatHeaders.com with a new mobile device, that device's info is added to the aggregate database. Visit the WhatHeaders.com data page to get it.

Limitations

There are two you need to know about. First, header field names are lowercased, regardless of what casing the client uses. HTTP header field names are supposed to be case-insensitive, so there's no guarantee whether a client will send "Host: example.com", "HOST: example.com" or "host: example.com". All three will be reported as "host: example.com" here.

Second, the ordering of headers is not preserved; they are alphabetized by field name.

Preserving this lost information is on the wishlist, so these limitations may go away in the future.

If you notice something important left out, or have other feedback or bug reports, please tell me.

Are you tracking all my personal private details for evil and/or marketing purposes?

We do save some info, but it's used for good, not evil :) Your raw request-headers are archived for statistical analysis. This anonymized bulk data is made publically available to the worldwide mobile web developer community.

Currently the requesting IP address and time is also saved. This isn't really any more of a "privacy violation" than regular web server logs are. We don't intend to ever share that information externally.

Who made this?

Aaron Maxwell, founder of Mobile Web Up, a mobile web design and development company.

If you're a smart-and-get-things done type who is just a tad too excited about this emerging mobile web thing, send over your resume.

Thanks

Thanks for using WhatHeaders.com! Please send feedback.