What browsers support HTML5 WebSocket API?

I am going to develop an instant messaging application that runs in the browser.

What browsers support the WebSocket API?

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.

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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 - Jetty 9.1 supports javax.websocket / JSR 356)
• 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
• [Tomcat 8.x][57] has native support for websockets RFC6455 and is JSR 356 compliant
• 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][25]
• [Apache ActiveMQ][26] V 5.6 supports RFC6455
• [Apache Camel][27] V 2.10 supports RFC6455
• [JBoss HornetQ][28]

In C#:

• [XSockets.NET][29]
• [SuperWebSocket][30]
• [Nugget][31]
• [Alchemy-Websockets][32]
• [Fleck][33]
• [SignalR] [34]

In PHP:

• [Ratchet][35]
• [phpwebsocket][36].
• [Extendible Web Socket Server][37]
• [phpdaemon][38]

In Python:

• [pywebsockets][39]
• [websockify][40]
• [gevent-websocket][41], [gevent-socketio][42] and [flask-sockets][56] based on the former
• [Autobahn][43]
• [Tornado][44]

In C:

• [libwebsockets][45]

In Node.js:

• [Socket.io][46] : Socket.io also has serverside ports for Python, Java, Google GO, Rack
• [sockjs][47] : sockjs also has serverside ports for Python, Java, Erlang and Lua
• [WebSocket-Node][48] - Pure JavaScript Client & Server implementation of HyBi-10.

[Vert.x (also known as Node.x)][49] : A node like polyglot implementation running on a Java 7 JVM and based on Netty with :

• Support for Ruby(JRuby), Java, Groovy, 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][50] as fallback for WebSockets

[Pusher.com][51] is a Websocket cloud service accessible through a REST API.

[DotCloud][52] cloud platform supports Websockets, and Java (Jetty Servlet Container), NodeJS, Python, Ruby, PHP and Perl programming languages.

[Openshift][53] 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][54].

The RFC for Websockets : [RFC6455][55]

[25]: http://grizzly.java.net/ "Grizzly" [26]: http://activemq.apache.org/ [27]: http://camel.apache.org/ [28]: http://www.jboss.org/hornetq/ [29]: http://xsockets.net [30]: http://superwebsocket.codeplex.com/ [31]: http://nugget.codeplex.com/ [32]: https://github.com/Olivine-Labs/Alchemy-Websockets [33]: https://github.com/statianzo/Fleck [34]: http://signalr.net/ [35]: http://socketo.me/ [36]: https://github.com/GeorgeNava/phpwebsocket [37]: https://github.com/wkjagt/Extendible-Web-Socket-Server [38]: https://github.com/kakserpom/phpdaemon [39]: http://code.google.com/p/pywebsocket/ [40]: https://github.com/kanaka/websockify [41]: http://pypi.python.org/pypi/gevent-websocket/ [42]: https://bitbucket.org/Jeffrey/gevent-socketio/src [43]: http://autobahn.ws [44]: http://www.tornadoweb.org [45]: http://git.warmcat.com/cgi-bin/cgit/libwebsockets/ [46]: http://socket.io/ [47]: http://sockjs.org [48]: https://github.com/Worlize/WebSocket-Node [49]: http://vertx.io/docs/ [50]: https://github.com/sockjs/sockjs-client#readme [51]: http://pusher.com/ [52]: https://www.dotcloud.com/ [53]: https://openshift.redhat.com/app/ [54]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Sockets [55]: https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc6455 [56]: http://kennethreitz.org/introducing-flask-sockets/ [57]: http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-8.0-doc/web-socket-howto.html