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Sometimes, people get disconnected from the live update server. Bugs, flaky Internet connection, maintenance, it happens.

I find the live updates quite useful for keeping track of new posts, but sometimes I get disconnected and I won't have any idea it happened. Could be hours before I notice the lack of activity, because sometimes, there really isn't any.

Could we get a visual indicator that tells us whether live updates are active on the current page? Here's two ideas:

  • a symbol in the header somewhere that changes depending on live connectivity

  • showing (?) in the title bar if the connection was dropped (not if it failed initially, no point in having it on every tab if that particular server is down)

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This suggestion is good, but not trivial to implement. I'm using the given WebSocket feature to generate real-time desktop notifications, and also encountered the issue you've mentioned.

Although my application is slightly different (I want to make sure that the connection always exists, you want to show a notification when something happens), the techniques are similar.

Chrome supports the online / offline events. On online, I'm resetting the socket connection: source code.
Firefox's online/offline events are useless, because these only fire when the user manually selects the "Work offline" option in the menu...

Alternative method
Currently, the backend broadcasts a "hb" message every 5 minutes. This characteristic can be utilized by checking whether the connection is stable or not with setInterval (source code).

  1. ws.onopen event - Store Date.now() in a variable, say lastHeartbeat, and start watching the connection using setInterval.
    In the watcher, check if the difference between Date.now() and lastHeartbeat is exceeds a certain value (at least >300 because the heartbeat runs every ~ 5 minutes).
  2. ws.onmessage event with message "hb" - Update lastHeartbeat with Date.now()

The disadvantage of the last method is that it's not known immediately whether or not the connection died. So, if you unplug your cable for a minute, and a message comes in during this minute, you won't get notified of it.

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  • PS. If anyone knows a reliable method to detect network connection in Firefox, please share. It's going to be used in a Firefox add-on, so NPAPI plugins are also alright (provided that the source code / clear documentation is available). I think that I've found the relevant commit in Chromium's source code, but I don't know how to use it: bugs.webkit.org/attachment.cgi?id=161672&action=prettypatch
    – Rob W
    Commented Dec 13, 2012 at 11:16
  • 5 minutes seems to be too long - I'd be interested to see how much bandwidth would be required to send a ping/pong every 30 seconds or so
    – Swadq
    Commented Dec 13, 2012 at 19:28
  • @Swadq The high-level ping/pong interval of 5 minutes is already implemented. I'm not proposing any changes to the API, but rather providing some details about the implementation of the requested feature.
    – Rob W
    Commented Dec 13, 2012 at 19:50
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Yes, please!

This would be very useful. Especially for users living in an area with terrible internet connectivity, where the connection gets lost all the time.

I use the live updates to observe my favorite tags on Stack Overflow and it would be very useful to see if live updates are still delivered or not.

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