I use this at work (Enterprise SAAS web software) and we had to implement a backup "polling every 5 seconds" for clients that would not support it. It's quite rare though. We assume that some caching proxy might be waiting for the GET request to be fully done to cache it and then give it to the user or something like this. The SSE would then never get updates, while every normal HTTP request would work
I've read that this does indeed happen with some HTTP proxies. In some environments that includes HTTPS because some environments intercept HTTPS traffic too. It's enough for me to consider SSE too unreliable to use if my application needs to be reliable with events, and it's the first thing I thought when I saw the SSE spec the first time.
Back beore SSE, I recall seeing some server-to-client event protocol specification inserted extra padding bytes after events in the middle of an HTTP response stream, just to convince some HTTP proxies to forward the event in an incomplete HTTP response, but I don't recall which protocol now. It was never entirely clear how much padding would be enough, or if any amount would be.
When cometd and the Bayeux publish-subscribe protocol was designed, this is why long-polling was always used, instead of streaming partial responses inside a single HTTP response. With correctly designed overlapping long-polling requests, it's possible to get event latency very similar to SSE, without this issue of lost events due to proxies. So that's a good, reliable choice, if you don't use WebSockets. In fact it's more reliable than WebSockets (which can also get stuck at some proxies), so if you value very reliable event delivery long-polling or just periodic polling are the way to do it, but with much higher overhead.
In theory SSE provides the option for mobile device power saving described at https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/server-sent-events.ht... Using more active protocols almost certainly defeats this. In theory a mobile network and network stack (modified inside the mobile browser where cleartext is available) could implement that power saving strategy for mostly-idle WebSockets too, which is another argument for WebSockets.
