Building Real-Time Features in React Without WebSocket Libraries

Building Real-Time Features in React Without WebSocket Libraries When developers hear "real-time," they reach for WebSocket libraries. Socket.IO, Pusher, Ably -- the ecosystem is full of them. But many real-time features do not need bidirectional communication. A stock ticker, a notification feed, a deployment log, a live sports score -- all of these are one-directional streams from server to client. For these use cases, the browser already has a built-in protocol that is simpler, lighter, and automatically reconnects: Server-Sent Events (SSE). Combine SSE with the Network Information API for connection awareness, and the BroadcastChannel API for cross-tab coordination, and you have a complete real-time toolkit -- zero WebSocket libraries required. In this article, we will build each piece from scratch first, see where the manual approach breaks down, then replace it with hooks from ReactUse that handle all the edge cases in a few lines. 1. Server-Sent Events with useEventSource What A