What browsers support HTML5 WebSocket API? [closed]

Client side

• Hixie-75:
  • Chrome 4.0 + 5.0
  • Safari 5.0.0
• HyBi-00/Hixie-76:
  • Chrome 6.0 - 13.0
  • Safari 5.0.2 + 5.1
  • iOS 4.2 + iOS 5
  • Firefox 4.0 - support for WebSockets disabled. To enable it see here.
  • Opera 11 - with support disabled. To enable it see here.
• HyBi-07+:
  • Chrome 14.0
  • Firefox 6.0 - prefixed: MozWebSocket
  • IE 9 - via downloadable Silverlight extension
• HyBi-10:
  • Chrome 14.0 + 15.0
  • Firefox 7.0 + 8.0 + 9.0 + 10.0 - prefixed: MozWebSocket
  • IE 10 (from Windows 8 developer preview)
• HyBi-17/RFC 6455
  • Chrome 16
  • Firefox 11
  • Opera 12.10 / Opera Mobile 12.1

Any browser with Flash can support WebSocket using the web-socket-js shim/polyfill.

See caniuse for the current status of WebSockets support in desktop and mobile browsers.

See the test reports from the WS testsuite included in Autobahn WebSockets for feature/protocol conformance tests.

Server side

It depends on which language you use.

In Java/Java EE:

• Jetty 7.0 supports it (very easy to use) V 7.5 supports RFC6455
• GlassFish 3.0 (very low level and sometimes complex), Glassfish 3.1 has new refactored Websocket Support which is more developer friendly V 3.1.2 supports RFC6455
• Caucho Resin 4.0.2 (not yet tried) V 4.0.25 supports RFC6455
• Tomcat 7.0.27 now supports it V 7.0.28 supports RFC6455
• JSR 356 included in Java EE 7 will define the Java API for WebSocket, but is not yet stable and complete. See Arun GUPTA's article WebSocket and Java EE 7 - Getting Ready for JSR 356 (TOTD #181) and QCon presentation (from 00:37:36 to 00:46:53) for more information on progress. You can also look at Java websocket SDK.

Some other Java implementations:

• Kaazing Gateway
• jWebscoket
• Netty
• xLightWeb
• Webbit
• Atmosphere
• Grizzly
• Apache ActiveMQ V 5.6 supports RFC6455
• Apache Camel V 2.10 supports RFC6455
• JBoss HornetQ

In C#:

• SuperWebSocket
• Nugget
• Alchemy-Websockets
• Fleck
• SignalR

In PHP:

• Ratchet
• phpwebsocket.
• Extendible Web Socket Server
• phpdaemon

In Python:

• pywebsockets
• websockify
• gevent-websocket, gevent-socketio based on the former
• Autobahn
• Tornado

In C:

• libwebsockets

In Node.js:

• Socket.io : Socket.io also has serverside ports for Python, Java, Google GO, Rack
• sockjs : sockjs also has serverside ports for Python, Java, Erlang and Lua
• WebSocket-Node - Pure JavaScript Client & Server implementation of HyBi-10.

Vert.x (also known as Node.x) : A node like polyglot implementation running on a Java 7 JVM and based on Netty with :

• Support for Ruby(JRuby), Java, Grovy, Javascript(Rhino/Nashorn), Scala, ...
• True threading. (unlike Node.js)
• Understands multiple network protocols out of the box including: TCP, SSL, UDP, HTTP, HTTPS, Websockets, SockJS as fallback for WebSockets

Pusher.com is a Websocket cloud service accessible through a REST API.

DotCloud cloud platform supports Websockets, and Java (Jetty Servlet Container), NodeJS, Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl programming languages.

Openshift cloud platform supports websockets, and Java (Jboss, Spring, Tomcat & Vertx), PHP (ZendServer & CodeIgniter), Ruby (ROR), Node.js, Python (Django & Flask) plateforms.

For other language implementations, see the Wikipedia article for more information.

The RFC for Websockets : RFC6455

A good workaround for those browsers that don't yet have native WebSocket support is with this implementation that uses flash to provide WebSocket support to JavaScript:

http://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js

This allows you to just code to WebSocket, and for browsers that have native support it'll use that. Otherwise it falls back to using flash for the support.

The latest versions of browsers have support for the WebSocket API today. Here are the common browsers that support it:

• Apple Safari (as of v5.0.1)
• Google Chrome (as of v6)
• Microsoft Internet Explorer (as of v10)
• Mozilla Firefox (as of v6 with "Moz" prefix, as of v11 without prefix)
• Opera (as of v10.70)

If you're looking for better legacy support have a look at the "Comet" model. There are frameworks today that make its implementation simpler, such as Nitrogen. Have a look at their chat room example.

You may also want to keep an eye on Google App Engine, which with its Channel API (soon available) will support the Comet model with a Web Sockets API interface, meaning that your client-side code won't need to know whether the server is communicating via open HTTP requests or web sockets. You can probably port their interface for use with your own server architecture too.

As of March 2012 from caniuse.com :

• IE10+
• Firefox 8+
• Chrome 14 +

Important to know:

Websocket support has been DROPPED from both Opera and Firefox 4 in December 2010 due to (general, non-browser specific) security issues:

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/12/websockets-disabled-in-firefox-4/

It seems the issue does not lie with websockets per se but with other Internet devices that proxy requests, and disabling websockets is just a workaround until the general issue is fixed.

Also, it seems the protocol (but not the API) is expected to change, even now e.g. Opera refers to which version of the protocol they actually implement. So even if it were turned on (where it is available at all) it is far from "production ready". This still is an experimental feature.

js.io implements WebSockets for most browsers, using Orbited. (however, the site is currently down).

Using js.io, you can develop your app right now using the WebSocket API. And when browser will implement WebSockets natively, you'll get more performances.

You can also use Hookbox which falls back to long-polling if websocket support is unavailable in the browser.

http://hookbox.org

http://bitshaq.com/2010/07/30/a-simple-experiment-with-hookbox/

It looks like IE 9 RC, Firefox 4 and Opera 11 don't support web sockets.

Apparently there is a security issue with it at the moment

This article http://hacks.mozilla.org/2010/12/websockets-disabled-in-firefox-4/ seems to be saying that other browsers (chrome and safari) will soon remove web sockets from their features.

But you can 'fake' a web socket using silverlight/flash as demonstrated here: http://html5labs.cloudapp.net/WebSockets/ChatDemo/wsdemo.html and https://github.com/gimite/web-socket-js

And then just wait for the browsers to catch up.

I'm afraid the only place you're going to find WebSocket support is in the trunk builds of Firefox at the moment. And as far as I know, the work there is still in progress. WebKit browsers (Safari & Chrome, for example) are just getting started on their implementations and they are not even available in the nightly builds.

Jabbers BOSH protocol seems to fit instant messaging very well. Give strophe a try with a server supporting BOSH such as ejabberd.

Opera 11 will support WebSockets based on the 76 draft, one can test it out with the current 10.70 alpha:
http://my.opera.com/desktopteam/blog/2010/10/11/websockets