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Comment by goodpoint | Hacker News Reader

--- WebSockets cannot benefit from any HTTP feature. That is:

    No support for compression
    No support for HTTP/2 multiplexing
    Potential issues with proxies
    No protection from Cross-Site Hijacking

---

Is that true? The web never cease to amaze.

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WebSockets support compression (ofc, the article goes on to detail this & point out flaws. I'd argue that compression is not generally useful in web sockets in the context of many small messages, so it makes sense to be default-off for servers as it's something which should be enabled explicitly when necessary, but the client should be default-on since the server is where the resource usage decision matters)

I don't see why WebSockets should benefit from HTTP. Besides the handshake to setup the bidirectional channel, they're a separate protocol. I'll agree that servers should think twice about using them: they necessitate a lack of statelessness & HTTP has plenty of benefits for most web usecases

Still, this is a good article. SSE looks interesting. I host an online card game openEtG, which is far enough from real time that SSE could potentially be a way to reduce having a connection to every user on the site

The problem with WebSockets is that hey are:

1) More complex and binary so you cannot debug them as easily, specially on live and specially if you use HTTPS.

2) The implementations don't parallelize the processing, with Comet-Stream + SSE you just need to find a application server that has concurrency and you are set to scale on the entire machines cores.

3) WebSockets still have more problems with Firewalls.

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