Thanks to all who downloaded and tested the first version of Brolly. I’m delighted to announce version 1.1, which performs more extensive testing of secure connections attempted using HTTPS and TLS 1.0 to 1.3.

It still includes Apple’s nscurl, which ensures a range of useful information in all versions of macOS from El Capitan onwards.

When running in Catalina and later, Brolly now performs its own test of server support for different TLS versions, displaying the results clearly at the top of the scrolling text results. Unfortunately, the test used for that isn’t compatible with older versions of macOS, which simply leave those boxes blank.

Brolly then attempts to make two separate connections to the server. The first of those disables all caching, and obtains the server’s response to establishing the connection, its NSHTTPURLResponse. This contains all sorts of useful information about the server, and can state which server operating system it’s running, the current time and date, server hosting details, and sometimes even Easter eggs – try this with this site, for instance, and you could end up with the offer of a job!

The other connection uses default settings, and should report any connection errors. For example, try to connect to a non-existent server and it will report that “A server with the specified hostname could not be found”.

Because these tests are performed concurrently, the results don’t necessarily follow a strict order, but are clearly labelled.

If you do encounter any bugs, or results which don’t appear correct, please provide the URL so that I can investigate further.

My next task is to extract certificate information from the server and perform trust checks, which I hope to be able to add to the next version. If there’s any other information or test which you’d like added, please let me know.

Brolly 1.1 is now available from here: brolly11