Chromium Blog: Web Sockets Now Available In Google Chrome
http://blog.chromium.org/2009/12/web-sockets-now-available-in-google.html

Web Sockets Now Available In Google Chrome

The Web Sockets API enables web applications to handle bidirectional communications with server-side process in a straightforward way.

When will this be usable?

"Starting in the Google Chrome developer channel release 4.0.249.0, Web Sockets are available and enabled by default. Web Sockets are "TCP for the Web," a next-generation bidirectional communication technology for web applications being standardized in part of Web Applications 1.0."

Chrome set to take over the world

The Web Sockets API enables web applications to handle bidirectional communications with server-side process in a straightforward way. Developers have been using XMLHttpRequest ("XHR") for such purposes, but XHR makes developing web applications that communicate back and forth to the server unnecessarily complex. XHR is basically asynchronous HTTP, and because you need to use a tricky technique like long-hanging GET for sending data from the server to the browser, simple tasks rapidly become complex. As opposed to XMLHttpRequest, Web Sockets provide a real bidirectional communication channel in your browser. Once you get a Web Socket connection, you can send data from browser to server by calling a send() method, and receive data from server to browser by an onmessage event handler.

なにこれおもしろそう

If you’re using a browser that supports web sockets, you might see some extra mouse cursors moving around. These are actually other people also looking at this page right now, live, as we speak. If you don’t see anything, try to open up this page in another browser window next to this one and move your mouse in it. This is an experiment I did to play around with Node.js and web sockets. I’ve put everything in a Gist in case you want to try it out yourself. I’ll explain how it works in this article.

If you’re using a browser that supports web sockets, you might see some extra mouse cursors moving around. These are actually other people also looking at this page right now, live, as we speak.