Browser: Microsoft IE10 is the first release supporting HTML5 Websockets API.

In my previous post "Microsoft has released IE 10 for windows 7", I have mentioned that this version comes with extensive support for HTML5 APIs, provided with a download link.

Among HTML5 APIs I was looking forward for the support of HTML5 Websocket API.

As I am a JCP member, working on Adopt-A-JSR program for testing the reference implementation (Tyrus) of Java API for WebSocket 1.0 (JSR 356), beside enhancing and validating the specification, that will be part of the next release of JEE7 (Java Enterprise Edition 7) which also includes a lot of server supports for HTML5 APIs as well as the cloud based applications.

I have tested my developed application on IE10 for communication with my endpoint deployed on Glassfish v4_b78 (The reference implementation for JEE7 specifications umbrella), and the result was successful, as the following Figure 1.

Figure 1: The testing results on IE10.

This means that IE10 is the first Microsoft browser version that supersedes previous versions 9- for HTML5 Websocket support.

Who Supports WebSockets Today?

The following table provides a brief summary of the support for WebSockets that most popular browsers provide at present.

Table 1 Browser Support for WebSockets

Browser	WebSockets Support
Internet Explorer	WebSockets is supported now in Internet Explorer 10. Metro applications written using JavaScript and HTML5 will support WebSockets as well.
Firefox	WebSockets are supported starting with version 6 of the browser released in mid-2011. Some very early support was offered in version 4 and then dropped in version 5.
Opera	Support for WebSockets has been removed in version 11.
Chrome	WebSockets are supported starting with version 14, which was released in September 2011.
Safari	Supports an earlier version of the WebSocket Protocol.

With the exception of Firefox, you can programmatically check for WebSockets support by looking at the window.WebSocket object.For Firefox, you should currently check the MozWebSocket object. It should be noted that most HTML5-related capabilities can be checked in browsers by means of a specialized library such as Modernizr (modernizr.com).

In particular, here’s the JavaScript code you need to write if you linked the Modernizr library to your page:

Now almost we have the chance to run all of HTML5 websocket based client's applications, on the majority of popular vendors browser.