Snaplet person here: Totally. It cannot, and it very likely will never be able to do that. Raw sockets were added, and subsequently removed, from Chromium.

Do you mean, connect from 1 browser tab to another?

Interestingly we can do this, sorta, but in Chrome only. Using arp you can open a network between multiple tabs of the same Chrome instance, putting each browser vm on a different private ip. I only see this useful, though, for testing clustering systems. There won't be any outside internet connectivity in a setup like this though.

Supabase developer here.

At this point, the proxy is necessary because all the major browsers block direct TCP/IP traffic. They allow websocket connections so that's how we're getting around it.

There have been proposals to open up TCP/IP traffic but they've all been shot down so for the security implications.