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Site Ready WebSockets

The Web gets richer and developers are more creative when sites and services can communicate and send notifications in real-time. WebSockets technology has made significant progress over the last nine months. The standards around WebSockets have converged substantially, to the point that developers and consumers can now take advantage of them across different implementations, including IE10 in Windows 8. You can try out a WebSockets test drive that shows real time, multiuser drawing that works across multiple browsers.

What is WebSockets and what does it do?

WebSockets enable Web applications to deliver real-time notifications and updates in the browser. Developers have faced problems in working around the limitations in the browser’s original HTTP request-response model, which was not designed for real-time scenarios. WebSockets enable browsers to open a bidirectional, full-duplex communication channel with services. Each side can then use this channel to immediately send data to the other. Now, sites from social networking and games to financial sites can deliver better real-time scenarios, ideally using same markup across different browsers.

What has changed with WebSockets?

WebSockets have come a long way since we wrote about them in December 2010. At that time, there were a lot of ongoing changes in the basic technology, and developers trying to build on it faced a lot of challenges both around efficiency and just getting their sites to work. The standard is now much more stable as a result of strong collaboration across different companies and standards bodies (like the W3C and the Internet Engineering Task Force).

The W3C WebSocket API specification has stabilized, with no substantive issues blocking last call. The specification has new support for binary message types. There are still issues under discussion, like improving the validation of subprotocols. The protocol is also sufficiently stabilized that it’s now on the agenda of the Internet Engineering Steering Group for final review and approval.

Site-ready technologies

The Web moves forward when developers and consumers can rely on technologies to work well. When WebSockets technology was shifting and “under construction,” we used HTML5 Labs as a venue for experimentation and feedback from the community. With a prototype we gain implementation experience that leads to stronger engagement in the working group and the opportunity to collect feedback from the community, both of which ultimately lead to a better, and more stable, design for developers and consumers. We’re excited and encouraged by how HTML5 Labs helped us work with the community to bring WebSockets to where it is today.

-- Brian Raymor, Program Manager for WebSockets

Comments

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2011
    Great news, thanks Microsoft!

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2011
    Please insert Microsoft Translator Widget. Thanks.

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2011
    One of the Modern day Web Browser standards I would like to see Internet Explorer to support in version 10 are. •WebM (If possible) •Support for text shadows •More rounded tabs in the User Interface instead of a rectangle shape tabs like

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2011
    wheee!

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2011
    you know what is sad.. Microsoft is got spell checking in IE.

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2011
    @Mario Text shadows are supported in IE10 PP3 which is included with the Windows 8 dev preview.

  • Anonymous
    September 15, 2011
    @Johnnyq3 Oh, I haven't used the Preview Cause I dislike platform previews..so i didn't know. Thanks!

  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2011
    Rounded interface elements are so 2001 (as in the XP teletubbie time)

  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2011
    Hello again, rounded tabs aren't so 2001... The Square like tabs looks alright but... round tabs looks better

  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2011
    Lack of support for rounded tabs is yesterday news. Now they are giving support. What else do you want?

  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2011
    Server-Sent Events went Last Call in March.  Will they make it in too, I wonder?

  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2011
    You can get WebM support for IE here: tools.google.com/.../webmmf

  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2011
    WebM with VP8 codec is bad for the environment. It lacks hardware support on all current devices which is making making playback on devices very energy inefficient. To put this into perspective let say that we use Youtube as an example. Youtube serves about 2 billion video's a day of about 3 minutes average lenght. A VP8 encoded video probably uses about 5 watt more to play on an average computer. This means that for the users of the Youtube site alone the usage of WebM exclusivly would amount to 100,000,000 Watt/hour extra electricity use a day. A pure waste of energy as there is no need to use that inefficient codec.

  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 16, 2011
    Lost site of the math in retyping the comment. Should be 500,000,000 Watt/hour lost for users of Youtube if they would serve WebM only.

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2011
    Dea IE developer team Sometimes when i have several tabs open in IE9,i close the tab i will use by mistake,it is possible to add a "Lock function" in the tab to avoid this type of situation? It can be a great feature right? Thank you

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2011
    One more thing, regarding this blog software, I once saw a t-shirt with "friends don't let friends use web-forms" printed on it :-)

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2011
    you are nothing but a troll. Live with it!

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2011
    i don't use IE9 because it saves pages slow, and when is saving a page, i can't scroll page and i can't switch tabs. Please fix in IE10.

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2011
    go away troll. that "unnecessary propaganda" is 100% true.

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2011
    I am a troll.. whatever kind of software MS come up with, I will keep trolling... becuase I am steve-jobs' buddy :D

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2011
    @Meni: Well, until you apologise for baseless accusation and missinformation, then I don't think you have rigth to demand anything from them. Like saying "FUD", when in fact they linked to that article which directly contradicts your comment, making your comments mainly FUD-like.(ironically) At least if you tried it with blog post, which didn't link to previous one for anybody to see... So when do you apologise?

  • Anonymous
    September 17, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2011
    IE-team. Nice work coming with IE10. I have two concerns: 1- Please improve the spellchecking as its relatively slower as well as if you manually correct the word, it doesn't recheck it unless you press space after the word. Imo, the spellchecking thread should be continuous and fast-and-fluid (optimized). 2- Here is the test of innerHTML vs add for select options => jsperf.com/options-add-vs-innerHtml . Compare he result in he browserscope graph. You guys need to look at the Safari performance in that test. Is it related to the one reported by DanglingPointer (nontroppo.org/.../Hixie_DOM.html)?

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2011
    The change in the score for Acid3 is a result of changes in the Acid3 test and not IE10pp3.  Don't believe me?  Try running Acid3 in IE9.  You'll get 100 now.

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2011
    Sorry about the duplicate post, I thought that the comment system has lost my comment.  Nope, it was just being slow.

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2011
    Same goes with Firefox. This means Acid3 is corrected after implementing the correct w3c standards implementation. Chrome 12 is failing 1 test now, well seems like they were implementing some non-standards alongside just to pass some joe's test!

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2011
    @Tom changed my name to avoid confusion.  Tested GC14 and it passes with 100.  Also Firefox 5.  That's all the browsers that I have installed. So, now it's time to move forward and find new dragons to slay.

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2011
    I only have 1 comment.  FIX this Blog Software!

  • Anonymous
    September 18, 2011
    What's the ETA on this feature request: connect.microsoft.com/.../create-download-in-ie-download-manager

  • Anonymous
    September 19, 2011
    @hAl, Tom and Nathan The problems with the IE blog software are 1- it allows unmoderated comments, even name-calling types of comments, off-topic comments, purely disparaging comments, abusive comments, uselessly rude, abrasive comments, advocacy comments, etc 2- it allows total anonymity and anonymity breeds contempt 3- it often does not work, it hangs, it fails, it is slow, etc hAl, Tom and Nathan: please find the link "Email Blog Author" in this page and send an appropriate request. If you lack inspiration, just copy and paste this message. Gérard Talbot

  • Anonymous
    September 19, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 19, 2011
    IE10 *.jxr(JPEGXR) Image support support

  • Anonymous
    September 19, 2011
    <b><i>Submit the feature request at connect.microsoft.com</b></i>

  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2011
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2011
    @Gérard Talbot, @Todd Its sad to say but I agree with both of your comments. I too used to submit bugs to Connect but I gave up.  I found the UI/Search to be frustrating to use and about as far from "inviting collaboration" as a system could be. This blog suffers the same fate.  The issue with posting comments has been known for 4-5 years yet little (if anything) has been done about it.  There was a re-vamp at one point to improve the styles and hook in a slightly better search but the underlying problems with commenting, too-long index page posts, and archive titles vs. useless dates still exist. @Sean Jenkin [MSFT] did momentarily drop into the conversation once to "look into" the issue but he was not heard from since. The problems all still exist to this day (and as I type this, I know that I have to copy my comment to the clipboard because I'm willing to bet $50 that my comment will not be saved - that's how well I trust the IE blog with comments)** The other issue (which this comment will suffer the fate of) is that once a new blog post has been made, comments on the previous thread effectively die and get no attention from Microsoft (from my experience) All of this is quite sad because I actually enjoy coming here to be informed of the changes coming up and the discussions about implementations that we might otherwise not understand. Steve ** yup! comment was lost - surprise, surprise.... man I wish there was someone here willing to take the bet - I could make a fortune!

  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2011
    Hey, I'm still here. I haven't forgotten about looking at it. Now let's see if this comment posts.

  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2011
    It did, that's good to know. :) Now for those of you who have frequent trouble posting to the IE blog, do you have reproducable steps that demonstrate the problem? Can you document them? Can you screen capture the experience? I'd like to be able to help work out what's going on, but I need data to go from. For those of you it's slow for, can you do a network trace so we can see what is slow? You can reach me by going here: blogs.msdn.com/.../contact.aspx

  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2011
    @Sean Jenkin The comment will not be saved if you spend more than a certain amount of time on the page after refresh. Someone here has already experimented with this and determined that 30min. will do the trick.

  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2011
    The loss of comments is more common the longer they are. Probably also relates to the time spent on the page. Double posts frequently happen because after posting nothing happens for 30 seconds (or more) and I reclick on [Post] button until the page makes some kind of indication that the button has been activated. The blog has no double post detection nor any other basic filtering that most common blogs have. Anoying is that while you are posting below all the comments the blog gives a "waiting for moderation" message above the comments. Also anoying is that the ieblog frontpage loads all media in all articles on the page leading to 5MB or more downloads for the frontpage if it has old articles with video in them even though you are not going to watch those old videos in old articles. This makes the blog terrible for mobile access. (repost as orginal effort has been lost, I'll try to create a double post now)

  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2011
    Oops, a quadruple post. A bit overenthausiatic clicking on the[Post] button after the original effort to post the above wast lost. The losing of the comment looked a page refresh directly after clicking the [Post] button. De double post is just waiting for an indication that you have clicked the [Post] button and then reclicking after ages of waiting just because absolutly NOTHING seems to be happening on the page.

  • Anonymous
    September 20, 2011
    Last comment it took 21 seconds for the page to react after posting (measured on stopwatch WP7 app) and then about 4 second to complelty refresh with the green "awaiting for moderation" bar but without the comment. Then I refrehed the page again myself to see if the reaction had actually posted which took another 8 seconds.   A sequence that actually felt rather fast for this blog as I have seen it slower with posting times over a minute.

  • Anonymous
    September 21, 2011
    not only are comments not saving properly - but now successful comments are being deleted afterwards! Blog Fail!

  • Anonymous
    September 21, 2011
    The comment has been removed