Identify browser as FirePHP-enabled

[Gary Bickford]

FirePHP is great!  It turns Firefox +gvim almost into a full-blown IDE. :)  I do have one suggestion that might be of value.

In my present project I am building a SOAP server and client.  Obviously the SOAP client is acting as a 'browser' in a sense.  For debugging, I have built a debug module that determines whether the HTTP_USER_AGENT contains 'PHP-SOAP' or 'Mozilla', and determines the debug output accordingly.  For the server, the debug output gets pushed to a file that I can tail, while the client uses FirePHP.

This made me realize that it would be useful if FirePHP had the option of either adding 'FirePHP' to the HTTP_USER_AGENT header, or as a separate header sent by the browser.  This would be cleaner than depending on 'Mozilla' which is faked by many non-Mozilla browsers.  As it happens, this came up when I used WebDeveloper to change my User Agent setting in order to fake out my bank, and forgot to set it back, so FirePHP wasn't sending my debug data!

[Christoph Dorn]

I have just switched the header communication for FirePHP from the X-FirePHP headers to the wildfire headers (http://www.wildfirehq.org/).

The next evolution of the wildfire protocol will allow for two-way communication at which point there will be extra headers indicating what the client is capable of handling. You will be able to use these headers to determine availability of FirePHP (rather than the user-agent header).

I don't have a timeline yet other than "early next year".