Karl von Randow

Charles 4

At long last, Charles 4 has been released! Charles 1 was released in 2002, nearly 14 years ago. Since then we’ve been through Charles 2 and Charles 3, both big upgrades. But for the past 11 months we’ve been hard at work on the biggest upgrade we’ve ever made to Charles!

Charles 4 includes an upgrade to the latest and greatest HTTP standard, the latest and greatest IP standard, and the biggest UI update ever for Charles. It is also the first paid upgrade in Charles’s long history.

HTTP 2 is all around you. It’s sneaky and you might not have noticed. Both the client and server need to support HTTP 2, otherwise they will downgrade automatically to HTTP 1.1. So with Charles 3 you would just have seen HTTP 1.1 everywhere. No more! With Charles 4 you can now see HTTP 2 working, and you can use all of your familiar tools; Repeat, Breakpoints, and so on. You’ll spot HTTP 2 hosts in Charles as they use a different icon—with a lightning bolt!

IPv6 is also all around you! If you’re lucky enough to have an IPv6 network and ISP you can turn on “Prefer IPv6 addresses when connecting to dual-stack hosts” on the Options tab in the Proxy Settings. Then you’ll see IPv6 addresses being used in Charles. Feel the modern IP networking (first published in 1998) flow through you!

With Charles 4 we’ve also taken the opportunity to spruce up the look of Charles, starting with the familiar, enigmatic and much-loved app icon.

I’ll let that sit by itself for a moment.

Fear not! It’s still the Charles jug, we’re not crazy! It’s just had a big polish, and we think it’s more beautiful than ever! We hope you do too.

We’ve also designed a completely new custom set of icons, giving Charles a more unified and refined appearance. Thank you to the wonderful Wolfgang Bartelme for all of his painstaking work on these icons and on our beloved Charles Jug 4.0.

Finally we’ve improved the native platform stylings on Mac OS X (soon to be macOS) and Windows; we’ve reduced border chrome and tweaked most of the dialog layouts in the app so that Charles looks more modern than ever.

On Mac OS X we’re using the brand new VAqua library by the excellent Alan Snyder. VAqua provides better graphical accuracy and higher performance, especially on retina screens. The keenest eyes amongst you may also notice that Charles 4 now uses sub-pixel antialiasing! Zoom in to check it out. And on the latest versions of Mac OS X, Charles 4 uses the new San Francisco typeface. Finally, for my Charlesitans with dark menu bars—there’s a little something for you in Charles 4 too.

On Windows we’re using the latest version of JGoodies, with support for Windows 8 and Windows 10. No more will your menus be odd colours! We’ve also fixed the egregious aliased text that previously appeared whenever you looked at XML responses.

There are lots of other little changes and improvements in Charles 4. We’ll be documenting these and updating the website over the coming weeks. Reach out to us on Twitter @charlesproxy if you have any questions or comments!

Don’t forget to download Charles 4 and check it out!