Accepting UDP in the Browser

Question

After curiously googling about potentially accepting UDP packets in web clients (JavaScript), I was surprised to come up with almost nothing except some articles about Google's experimental QUIC Protocol. Here's a recent post about it in the Chromium blog.

My questions are as follows:

• Are there any current plugins/extensions/etc. that could allow browsers to accept UDP packets?
• If so, how can that be used to accept packets from a NodeJS server using the dgram library?

With HTML5, WebGL, and web-based gaming starting to litter the internet, I thought more people would be talking about this.

I'm also curious about what the web development community as a whole thinks of QUIC, and if/when standardization of the protocol would potentially take place. Are there are any efforts besides QUIC to standardize UDP (or UDP-like) support for web clients?

Answer 1

HTTP/3 with QUIC & UDP under the hood are finally available in browsers!

• In Firefox: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2021/04/quic-and-http-3-support-now-in-firefox-nightly-and-beta/

• In Chrome: https://blog.chromium.org/2020/10/chrome-is-deploying-http3-and-ietf-quic.html

• In Safari:

  Settings > Safari > Advanced > Experimental Features > HTTP/3