HTML5 WebSocket support

Dylan has posted a good round up of the state of WebSocket support over on CometDaily.

As you can see, the browser support is limited, and the version of WebSocket supported comes into it too. The two biggest browsers, Internet Explorer and Firefox (3.x) do not support WebSocket at all. Firefox 4 beta does, but the release of that has been pushed back to 2011.

One thought on “HTML5 WebSocket support”

  1. According to the wikipedia article on websockets:

    Unfortunately, a recent update to the draft (version 76) broke compatibility with reverse-proxies and gateways because the 8 bytes of data the client must send after the headers is not advertised in a Content-Length header, so the intermediates won’t forward that data until the handshake completes. And since the handshake needs those 8 bytes to complete, the handshake never completes and deadlocks. In current state of affairs, it’s not advisable to modify such intermediate components to support this non-standard HTTP behaviour because doing so would render the components vulnerable to HTTP smuggling attacks, since an attacker would just have to pretend trying to upgrade to the WebSocket protocol in a request to be able to send more data than the target plain HTTP server can parse, possibly bypassing some mandatory security filtering. It is not known if this recent breakage will be worked around in a new draft or not.

    It looks like websockes still has a bit of maturing to do.

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