[e1g]

In case the email collection form gets hugged to death, here's a mirror https://web.archive.org/web/20220111162712/https://files.abl...

In our experience, many enterprise networks/vpns/firewalls still break websocket connections even when using wss, and it should not be used as the only communication channel even if you target evergreen browsers.

[paddybyers]

Disclaimer: I work for Ably. I agree in principle, so the libraries that handle websockets and also fallback transports using comet (eg SocketIO) are still widely used for that reason, and the commercial pub/sub service providers generally also support comet fallbacks. However, we now find that it is really very rare that clients are unable to use wss.

[e1g]

WSS breaking is surprisingly common for clusters of our enterprise users, to the order of 5-10%. Specifically, when business users connect through security networks like Zscaler, often their employers will MITM all connections (similar to how AdGuard works) but in a way that breaks WSS. We have rigorous monitoring for both frontend and backend, and can trace these failures with accuracy - consistently, both the frontend and the ingress firewall think that the other one cancelled the connection attempt, so some network hop in-between did that. Every other network connection during that time works as expected (long polling/SSE over H2), but WSS get interrupted and sometimes can't reconnect. We still love the aliveness of web sockets, but have to architect data fetching in a way that doesn't depend on them working.

[matt_oriordan]

That's surprising to hear, we definitely don't see anywhere near the order of 5-10%, at best on order of magnitude less.

Out of interest, what geography and industries are you operating in where you see such a high rate of incompatibiltiy?

Matt, Ably co-founder

[e1g]

China and LATAM are definitely overrepresented. We deal with conglomerates and manufacturers, so it's vaguely industrial + heavy industry, but all these users are corporate folks using standard-issue BigCo laptops (almost certainly loaded with standard "security" layers from a dozen different vendors, making detailed diagnosis nearly impossible for us as a SaaS provider).

[matt_oriordan]

Thanks for the explanation, useful to know.

[app4soft]

Thank You for mirror!