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Comment by Wilya | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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

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