Re: Internet Explorer Mobile Touch Events support

This is great news Jacob, thanks!

We've certainly felt we'd never be able to drop support for touch events in
blink, even if we had a good replacement like pointer events.  Heck, we're
still trying <https://codereview.chromium.org/431653003/> to
deprecate non-standard mouse event properties added well over a decade ago
for compat with IE <grin>, so I definitely feel your pain here.  I'm
excited that we seem to have all learned our lesson and will hopefully focus
<http://www.chromium.org/blink#vendor-prefixes> on standards-track
evolution going forward :-)

I'm really looking forward to seeing the data that backs up your "mouse
support is broken on 10% of top sites when touch events are enabled" claim.
 As I've mentioned previously, this doesn't match our anecdotal experience
with touchscreen laptops running Chrome (there's definitely some issues,
but it's quite rare for anyone to notice any these days).  I just came up
with a plan <https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=392584#c4>
last night for how we could do our own measurement here (but accuracy is
still tricky). I expect to share data sometime after I'm back from vacation
in a couple weeks.  We're deeply committed to driving down this problem
further and eventually enabling the TouchEvent API in Chrome in all cases.

I'm looking forward to continuing the great relationship we have between
the Chrome team and IE teams pushing the web platform forward in a
rational, performant AND compatible way.

  Rick



On Thu, Jul 31, 2014 at 1:38 PM, Jacob Rossi <Jacob.Rossi@microsoft.com>
wrote:

>  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
>