Isn't this just a trailing GET? This technique has been around since the 90's and has been used in lots of applications.

The comparison to AJAX in 2005 is a little odd for me, as this is already a pretty mature technique. AJAX in 2005 was pretty novel because the prior (to Google, and others) use-case was for early Microsoft web apps tied heavily to IE.

If you remove the constraint "in a web browser" then there is nothing here at all to talk about. Making an acronym for stuff people have been doing routinely since the 1970s is kind of weird. This is the problem with web programmers.

SSE = Streaming SIMD Extensions in my brain. They should name it something else.

Yeah, I was confused too. "What does an instruction set have to do with a web technology?".

But I don't think it should get renamed, it should pretty easy to differentiate between "Streaming SIMD Extensions" and "Server-sent events" according to the context (I didn't because I've never heard of the term "Server-sent events" before of this post)

I've played with implementing both SSE and websockets on embedded hardware, and SSE is nice because of the simplicity--no need to do a handshake or other setup like with websockets. If you're primarily sending data from the server to the browser, SSE + a simple REST api (to send data back from browser to server) is a pretty nice combo.

Doesn't seem as big a change as what Ajax was back when. Before Ajax there was no async interaction from the browser to the webserver. SSE is just another way to do async, except it's now push instead of pull...

Even in the AJAX timeframe, there was still a way to do async push style interaction from server to client. See Comet: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comet_%28programming%29

Gmail used this technique via a hidden iframe.

Yeah; I had done this sort of stuff in 1998 using a custom HTTP server I wrote in VBScript.

On IE they used ActiveXObject called "htmlfile"

SSE ?

Server Sent Events