Comments on: Why we don’t need HTML5 WebSocket

By: Martin Tyler

Martin Tyler — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 21:42:55 +0000

It’s a shame they support different, non compatible, versions of the WebSocket spec though!

By: deepak

deepak — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 20:15:54 +0000

about the supporting browsers…

Safari, safari for iphone4 & firefox 4 are now supporting the websockets…

and as of web-socket implementation by framework with decent fail back to comet techniques… check out https://atmosphere.dev.java.net/

By: Lukas

Lukas — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 13:46:56 +0000

Well there are flash fallback solutions, so to me the question is just what to do with mobile clients that atm do not support websockets (i hear early beta releases of the iPhone 4.0 iOS supported them) nor flash (this might change soon, though obviously not for the iPhone).

By: Adam Iley

Adam Iley — Tue, 25 May 2010 11:02:56 +0000

By: Martin Tyler

Martin Tyler — Wed, 05 May 2010 09:02:23 +0000

That site is from a WebSocket vendor, who also blogged recently about proxy issues. I covered this on a more recent blog http://blog.caplin.com/2010/04/13/html5-websocket-failure-rates/ where Google did some tests and found a lot of users cannot connect through proxies.

The HTTP CONNECT method only helps when the browser knows about a proxy, which isn’t always the case.

By: Togg

Togg — Wed, 05 May 2010 08:52:46 +0000

It seems the proxy support should even get easier with websockets?
“A Web Socket detects the presence of a proxy server and automatically sets up a tunnel to pass through the proxy. The tunnel is established by issuing an HTTP CONNECT statement to the proxy server, which requests for the proxy server to open a TCP/IP connection to a specific host and port. Once the tunnel is set up, communication can flow unimpeded through the proxy.”

http://www.websockets.org/about.html

By: Martin Tyler

Martin Tyler — Sun, 25 Apr 2010 08:43:18 +0000

Hi Matt,

It’s good to see some big players dropping support for IE6, hopefully it will have a knock on effect, but at the moment a lot of corporate users still have IE6, besides that IE7 and IE8 don’t have WebSocket either – so I don’t really see the finish line for widespread WebSocket support unfortunately.

I think most people will be using WebSockets in one of two ways.. either using an existing Comet solution that adds WebSocket support, but still covers all the other connection techniques… or for new Web apps that are on the cutting edge and more of a demo/showcase and don’t have to worry about users that much.

By: Matt Basta

Matt Basta — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 11:35:08 +0000

This isn’t so much of a “why we don’t need websockets” so much as a “why i’d rather not care about websockets” post. Most sites have dropped IE6 support, proxies have a nasty habit of killing off long-polling comet requests, and the complexity is not a factor: all other solutions for “push”-style requests are complicated, but are in a wrapper for simplicity. I can only imagine that WebSockets will have numerous libraries to wrap it when it’s available.

By: Comet Daily » Blog Archive » HTML 5 WebSocket Updates

Comet Daily » Blog Archive » HTML 5 WebSocket Updates — Thu, 22 Apr 2010 04:17:50 +0000

[...] a blog by me on Why we don’t need HTML 5 WebSocket and a blog by Greg on WebSocket Chat which cover some opinions on [...]

By: Real-Time Web Posts 03/03/2010 | Phil Leggetter - Software Consultant

Real-Time Web Posts 03/03/2010 | Phil Leggetter - Software Consultant — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 09:13:22 +0000

[...] Why we don’t need HTML5 WebSocket – a discussion on the problems with WebSockets – Martin Tyler [...]