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Comment by stedaniels | Hacker News Reader

Seems like both of them require as server. Something I think means the title is misleading about. It's certainly ambiguous. I was excited to see a browser based, all client side IRC client. Oh well.

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I'm not sure I see how you can connect to an irc server directly from the browser without some sort of proxy. You can't do TCP from js.

What about WebSockets, aren't they TCP?

Not directly. More like TCP-like messaging over HTTP. The server needs to understand the websockets protocol.

Writing a basic server that strips the websockets part from messages and forwards them to a real TCP server isn't very hard, but it's still a server you need.

It's not really "over HTTP", it's just an HTTP handshake:

  The WebSocket Protocol is an independent TCP-based protocol.  Its
  only relationship to HTTP is that its handshake is interpreted by
  HTTP servers as an Upgrade request.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6455#section-1.7

both chrome and firefox have tcp sockets apis, they are only usable in specific contexts, but you can write a web based irc client (there are a few around)

I stand corrected. Though as far as I can tell, it works only for apps in the chrome case[0] , and privileged web apps in firefox case[1].

[0] http://developer.chrome.com/apps/socket.html [1] https://wiki.mozilla.org/WebAPI/Security/TCPSocket

FWIW the System Applications Working Group at the W3C is working on a Raw Sockets spec for the browser, but I don't think a final draft will be ready until 2014. Adoption across most browsers will then take a little longer.

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