1589432 - Display information about ongoing websockets started before netmonitor was active

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(DevTools :: Netmonitor, enhancement, P3)

Description

[gap.space]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10.14; rv:71.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/71.0

Steps to reproduce:

Open a page with an active websocket connection. Open the dev tools after the websocket connection has been established.

Actual results:

The networks pane does not show the connection at all.

Expected results:

It would be nice if the netmonitor was at least able to show a stub entry for ongoing WS connections with any information that is available at that point without recording. (e.g. the URL & remote address)

In an ideal world, the network pane would also be able to show any status changes and messages/frames that were sent or received from that point onward.

My particular use-case is for guided debugging with end-users who have encountered unusual states but have difficulty communicating steps to reproduce. We do have our own logging workarounds, but they involve keeping our own cache of recent messages just for display purposes. If anything, it'd be nice simply for when I open a new window while debugging -- since websockets are frequently started early in a startup process, it's a race for me to open dev tools or else perform an otherwise-unnecessary page refresh.