Internet Explorer Mobile Touch Events support

Hi all,

I wanted to share that Microsoft has announced a coming update to Windows Phone 8.1 that will introduce a number of changes targeted at providing our users with a compatible mobile web experience [1]. Today's mobile web heavily targets iOS and Android via browser sniffing, the use of -webkit prefixed APIs, etc. Our customers deserve a quality mobile experience, and to do that it requires changes to our platform to runs today's iOS/Android specific mobile web code. This update will be made available (via the emulator or the Windows Phone Developer Preview program) soon and we'll detail the specific API changes at that time (the major changes are described in our blog).  Included in these changes is support for Touch Events.

The statement I made when we joined the Touch Events Community Group remains true:

"Nothing has changed with respect to our position on the Touch Events API itself. We continue to believe Pointer Events is necessary to support today's diverse device ecosystem and is key to Internet Explorer customers who enjoy touch, mouse, pen, and Kinect input modalities on the web. But we're cognizant of Touch Event usage on the web, and we want to be a part of helping rationalize the two models as best possible."

Supporting Touch Events is our next step in helping rationalize these two models together as it gives us the implementation experience to help contribute to this group with how Pointer and Touch Events coexist, enables a compatible web experience for our users today, and makes it smoother for web developers to transition their sites from Touch to Pointer.

Going forward, we continue to see Pointer Events as the best model for the web. In the blog post, you'll see that we did an experiment with Touch Events on devices that support other input modalities like mouse and keyboard. What we found was that about 10% of top sites were broken for mouse/keyboard users due to coding patterns that assume Touch Events support means touch-only devices (we'll share the specific site data once I've compiled it in a digestible form).  This is one example of why we'll continue to encourage developers to use Pointer Events.  It's also one reason why (for the time being) we intend for Touch Events to be in IE mobile only.

If you have questions or concerns, don't hesitate to ask.

-Jacob

[1] http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2014/07/31/the-mobile-web-should-just-work-for-everyone.aspx