According to these articles, Websocket success rate is only 63 % (if you have a websocket-ready browser).
And this InfoQ article (http://www.infoq.com/articles/Web-S
That email and article are approaching two years old.
Those problems were either server or proxy related. The reason that wss:// is more successful is because SSL traffic is more opaque to intermediaries and so it is more likely that it will just be passed along without interference.
As WebSockets becomes more common, those issues will begin to dissipate as the issues are fixed in proxies, firewalls, load-balancers, and web servers.
Also, regarding WebSockets support in browsers, if you include the Flash based web-socket-js as a polyfill/fallback in your web application then you get nearly universal browser support.