Platform/Input/Touch

This page describes the state of touch input on all tier-1 platforms.

In general touch events received from the user can be dispatched to web content in the form of (a) touch events (b) pointer events and (c) mouse events.

Touch events are covered by [1]. In general these are widely used on the web but have main thread dependencies which makes them unsuitable for async touch-based pan/zoom.

Pointer events were proposed by Microsoft. Initially it had support from Google but then they changed their mind and as of this writing they do not plan to support it. Microsoft is trying to push pointer events and people from MS Open Tech are actively implementing pointer events support in Gecko. In Gecko we would like to have pointer events and would also like Google to support them for better interoperability.

Mouse events are also dispatched for backwards compatibility with non-touch-aware web content. The only cases where mouse events are being dispatched to content are when the user does a "tap" and the resulting touch events are not prevent-defaulted by web content.