Comment by Aurornis
20 hours ago
> So, no WebSockets
The corporate firewall debate came up when we considered websockets at a previous company. Everyone has parroted the same information for so long that it was just assumed that websockets and corporate firewalls were going to cause us huge problems.
We went with websockets anyway and it was fine. Almost no traffic to the no-websockets fallback path, and the traffic that did arrive appeared to be from users with intermittent internet connections (cellular providers, foreign countries with poor internet).
I'm 100% sure there are still corporate firewalls out there blocking or breaking websocket connections, but it's not nearly the same problem in 2025 as it was in 2015.
If your product absolute must, no exceptions, work perfectly in every possible corporate environment then a fallback is necessary if you use websockets. I don't think it's a hard rule that websockets must be avoided due to corporate firewalls any more, though.
I've had to switch from SSE to WebSockets to navigate a corporate network (the entire SSE would have to close before the user received any of the response).
Then we ran into a network where WebSockets were blocked, so we switched to streaming http.
No trouble with streaming http using a standard content-type yet.