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.

$(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.