+++
date = "2010-04-05"
title = "Detect browser Web Sockets support"
tags = ["html5", "websockets", "javascript", "jquery"]
slug = "detect-browser-web-sockets-support"
+++
HTML5 Web Sockets are awesome! I've been toying around with it for a bit today and noticed that not every browser supports native HTML5 Web Sockets yet.

Google Chrome 5 has native support for web sockets, FireFox 3.6 does not. This poses a problem if you're building something awesome that does require web sockets.
~

Luckily, it's easy to detect web sockets support through JavaScript. All you really need to do is check if `WebSocket` is defined or not.

Here's a simple example, note that I'm using jQuery here.

``` javascript
$(document).ready(function() {
  if( typeof(WebSocket) != "function" ) {
    $('body').html("<h1>Error</h1><p>Your browser does not support HTML5 Web Sockets. Try Google Chrome instead.</p>");
  }
});
```

Maybe there are better ways, but _it works for me_.