Some interesting information on WebSockets recently came to my attention. Greg Wilkins posted to the hybi mailing list about Websocket success rates and TLS extension which links to some original research done by Google employees here while looking at their SPDY protocol, but they used WebSocket for their tests.
I have always been suspect of WebSocket through proxies. Most people seemed to either not understand the issues or try to ignore them. An article on InfoQ on How HTML5 Web Sockets Interact With Proxy Servers was the first thing I had read that even addressed it at all.
If you did not read the links, it basically says that WebSocket over HTTP will fail for 37% of users, over HTTPS it should work ok. Of course that is only for people with WebSocket capable browsers (About 7% of people at the moment).
As I have said before, WebSocket is a step in the right direction, but it is just the latest tool in the Comet Server implementers tool box, for everyone else – come back in a few years time!