Charles v3.4 released
After six months of development I’ve released Charles v3.4.
This version features major SSL changes improvements including:
- You must now explicitly turn on SSL proxying on a per-site basis. This is to prevent confusion and problems with Charles’s SSL certificates, and also to save users from accidentally violating their own privacy by recording unwanted SSL communication inside Charles.
- The SSL CA certificate has changed, but thankfully so have the ways of installing it. In Firefox after installing the Charles add-on (now also automatic) you can choose “Install Charles CA SSL Certificate” from the Charles submenu in the Tools menu. For your OS as a whole, there is a similar option in the Help menu. The SSL certificate change was to address faults in Mac OS X Leopard and later.
- Client SSL certificates are now supported for authentication. There is an option to load them in the Proxy menu.
- When Charles creates an SSL certificate for a site you can now permanently trust that SSL certificate in your browser. This can negate the need to trust the Charles CA SSL certificate at all.
Version 3.4 also adds a much requested “only record these sites” option in the Recording settings. I am still working on a better way to reduce the noise in Charles, but this will be useful in the meantime.
There are many other changes and fixes listed in the Version History, please take a look.
Please let me know if you encounter any problems, particularly regressions.
September 28th, 2009 at 2:40 am
Excellent! Thanks for the new feature “Map Local & Map Remote in the contextual menu” – this makes it so easy to set up a local file to test some changes.
September 28th, 2009 at 8:04 am
Cool, congrats on the release, sounds great, looking forward to giving it a try!
September 28th, 2009 at 8:45 pm
Great! Glad to see your still with this. Your program is still an invaluable tool while developing sites. Thanks
September 29th, 2009 at 2:29 am
That’s right. I can’t imagine development without Charles, I know a few people who bought it because of my recommendations.
Great stuff. Thank you!
And yes, noise reduction would be awesome.
September 29th, 2009 at 4:20 am
Within Map Remote you used to be able to past in a url into the Host box and when you hit okay it would break out the url into the correct areas. This was a huge time saver but it looks like its gone now.
October 5th, 2009 at 12:38 am
Hey man, i am a Chinese ,so my english is not so good . I came here to tell you that we all like your software —MidpSSH , but recently there is some pproblem : MidpSSH could not work in blackberry OS 5.0 , this troubled me for 1 month .
Can you help to rebuild MidpSSH ? Thanks , we all need it
October 5th, 2009 at 11:27 am
You’re absolutely right, it is related to a change I made in the internal parsing of those fields! I have made a change in the latest beta, 3.4.1b1, where it now parses URLs out of the Host field. So paste into there and after clicking OK or moving to another field it will parse it. Please download the beta and let me know how it works for you.
http://www.charlesproxy.com/beta/
October 6th, 2009 at 5:55 am
Thanks – the remote mapping pasting of the entire url works again!
October 6th, 2009 at 11:54 am
Great, just upgraded to v3.4 , keep the good work.
October 7th, 2009 at 1:03 am
I’ve had to roll back to an earlier version, I was finding that in 3.4 any edits I made to requests were being ignored. Charles would show my edited request, but the response I got back would be for the unedited initial request
October 7th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
You rock Karl
Thanks for the update – though I have a problem getting “only record these sites” feature to work (version 3.4.1b1):
As putting normal external URLs in the include list works perfectly (e.g. http://xk72.com), if I write local dev URLs (http://localhost, http://127.0.0.1), no recording happens.
What could be the issue?
Anyway – keep up the great work!
October 7th, 2009 at 10:44 pm
just adding: Mac OSX 10.5.8, browsing with Safari
October 8th, 2009 at 6:02 am
Is it necessary to uninstall a previous version before updating?
October 8th, 2009 at 7:37 am
@Andre No need to uninstall a previous version. Just install over the top.
October 8th, 2009 at 7:38 am
@Steffen This sounds like the ‘localhost bypasses proxies’ issue. Can you check that out and let me know if that was the problem?
October 8th, 2009 at 7:48 am
@Chris That’s no good – can you please email me via the contact page on the Charles site and send me a step-by-step example of this not working? It appears to work in my tests but it’s likely you’ve found a case I’m not testing!
October 12th, 2009 at 9:10 pm
I have the same problem as Chris – changing POST requests results in the changes being shown in charles but not in the actual request to the server.
Please check this – it obviously causes big trouble.
Rafi
October 13th, 2009 at 8:28 am
@Raphael Please try the latest beta from http://www.charlesproxy.com/beta/ and let me know if this resolves the problem for you?
October 13th, 2009 at 7:11 pm
@Karl: Yes, the beta seems to work fine.
October 14th, 2009 at 12:41 am
Hey Karl big problem in release 3.4.0 the no caching isn’t working it still put temporary files in cache : charles_bodyxxxxx.tmp
it still continues to cache that is very bad
October 14th, 2009 at 8:29 am
@Bruno The No Caching tool is to prevent your browser caching. Charles still records the traffic and stores large requests/responses in the TEMP directory. If you don’t want Charles to record you can add sites to the ignore list in the Recording Settings.