White papers

Why can't I send UDP packets from a browser?

Premise In 2017 the most popular web games like agar.io are networked via WebSockets over TCP. If a UDP equivalent of WebSockets could be incorporated into browsers, it would greatly improve the networking of these games. Background Web browsers are built on top of HTTP, which is a stateless request/response protocol initially designed for serving static web pages. HTTP is built on top of TCP, a low-level protocol which guarantees data sent over the internet arrives reliably, and in the same order it was sent.