Firebase - Is There A Flag To Force Long Polling When Websockets Are Blocked By Corporate Proxy/firewall?

I'm developing a simple corporate AngularJS app and was planning on using Firebase for the backend. The browsers I have to support are IE8 and Chrome (latest). I have managed to fi

Solution 1:

you can use Firebase.INTERNAL.forceLongPolling(); to force long polling Firebase.INTERNAL.forceWebSockets(); to force web socket

Solution 2:

I'm sure there is a better way but I just went in to firebase-debug.js and changed the following function:

fb.realtime.WebSocketConnection["isAvailable"] = function() {
  var isOldAndroid = false;
  if(typeof navigator !== "undefined" && navigator.userAgent) {
    var oldAndroidRegex = /Android ([0-9]{0,}\.[0-9]{0,})/;
    var oldAndroidMatch = navigator.userAgent.match(oldAndroidRegex);
    if(oldAndroidMatch && oldAndroidMatch.length > 1) {
      if(parseFloat(oldAndroidMatch[1]) < 4.4) {
        isOldAndroid = true
      }
    }
  }
  return!isOldAndroid && fb.WebSocket !== null && !fb.realtime.WebSocketConnection.forceDisallow_
};

to instead read:

fb.realtime.WebSocketConnection["isAvailable"] = function() {
  returnfalse
};

This worked, Chrome now long polls automatically and my app can communicate with Firebase. I made the same change to the minified firebase.js but would obviously prefer a more future-proof workaround instead of this hack if anyone can suggest one.