Will IE9 now be supporting WebSocket?

Question

The question's pretty straightforward and the old topic is here. I'm hoping to get up-to-date answers since IE9's gonna be released this March 14, 2011.

In addition, I would also like to ask when will Firefox and Opera be supporting WebSockets?

Answer 1

I've been following both the development of IE9 and I also participate in the HyBi WG (WebSockets protocol). Microsoft has been keeping the demo implementation of WebSockets up to date with the latest revisions of the protocol, however, I suspect that the initial release of IE9 will not have built-in WebSockets support. It will probably not be until IE10 unless they start to see it as a big competitive disadvantage in which case we will likely see it added in a IE9 update before IE10.

Firefox will likely support WebSockets in an update to FF4 or with FF5 (but the plan is that 5 will come out this year). Also, you can turn on the current implementation in FF4 using a about:config option.

I have no idea about Opera. They are interesting in the protocol but they've been pretty silent on the HyBi list.

Also, if you need WebSockets right now you can always use the Flash shim/fallback web-socket-js.

Update:

I forgot, Opera 11.00 does have WebSockets support built-in but disabled. Go to opera:config and search for WebSocket.

So in summary, just about every modern browser has WebSockets support in some way either built-in and enabled (Chrome, Safari, iOS), built-in but disabled (FF4 and Opera), as a downloadable add-on (IE9), or using the web-socket-js Flash emulator (everything except iOS).