There are many blogs and discussions about WebSocket and HTTP, and many developers and sites strongly advocate WebSockets, but I still can not understand why.

for example (arguments of WebSocket lovers):

HTML5 Web Sockets represents the next evolution of web communications—a full-duplex, bidirectional communications channel that operates through a single socket over the Web.
( http://www.websocket.org/quantum.html )

HTTP supports streaming: request body streaming(you are using it while uploading large files) and response body streaming.

During making the connection with WebSocket, client, and server exchange data per frame which is 2 bytes each, compared to 8 kilobytes of HTTP header when you do continuous polling.

Why do that 2 bytes not include TCP and under TCP protocols overhead?

GET /about.html HTTP/1.1
Host: example.org

This is ~48 bytes HTTP header.

HTTP chunked encoding - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chunked_transfer_encoding :

23
This is the data in the first chunk
1A
and this is the second one
3
con
8
sequence
0

• So, the overhead per each chunk is not big.

Also, both protocols work over TCP, so all TCP issues with long-live connections are still there.

Questions:

1. Why is the WebSockets protocol better?
2. Why was it implemented instead of updating the HTTP protocol?