Websockets are likely in the future. There are a number of benefits to supporting websockets:
- less resource intensive on clients which support them
- less delay fetching resources on client (no request/response for SWF)
- will work on platforms which don’t support flash
The reason it is not supported yet is because many of these are nice-to-haves and not required. We’ve been focusing on:
- making chat reliable (less dropped messages, less errors connecting)
- making sure chat features scale (currently reworking how our emoticon features work so that we can handle the ~30000 emoticons that currently exist (and growing very quickly)
- supporting our product teams to create new Twitch features
So yes, this will likely happen. When? I can’t say.