SSE is fine except stupid Internet Explorer doesn't support it: http://caniuse.com/#feat=eventsource http://caniuse.com/#feat=eventsource A goal of Firehose is

SSE is fine except stupid Internet Explorer doesn't support it: http://caniuse.com/#feat=eventsource http://caniuse.com/#feat=eventsource A goal of Firehose is to have the fewest number of transports possible so the client doesn't have to spend much time negotiating the transport. I found WebSockets was more widely supported (http://caniuse.com/#feat=websockets http://caniuse.com/#feat=websockets) and HTTP long polling could take care of the rest. Before I built Firehose I looked at socket.io, which had a ton of transports, but found that it was too slow, flakey, and unpredictable for our needs.