How to test for Touch-Events now that Chrome fails standard tests?

Question

I used to rely on

var supportsTouch = 'ontouchstart' in document;

to test for touch support in mobile and desktop browsers. Based on that test I bind eventListeners to click- or touch-events. This works fine in ALL current browser versions but the latest update to Chrome Canary (24.0.1275.0 canary) and of course the DEV version fail this test.

I checked on the current modernizr test but that returns a false positive as well, meaning it states that chrome supports touch even though the feature is disabled.

My current workaround is to test for any kind of mobile browser first and only if that returns positive uses the above test to check for touch. Downside of this is that you cannot use the handy "emulate touch events" option in chrome's dev-tools. Ideas?

Answer 1

Short answer: Your test will work again now in any current of Chrome. But probably not forever.

Long answer:

The Chrome team wanted to add touch events into desktop browsers, because of the growing number of desktops with touch-capable screens. So they did - probably around the time of 24.0 Canary. They then found that loads of people were doing what you're doing to "detect touch devices". The problem with this is you're only testing if the browser supports touch events, not the device (same goes for Modernizr.touch). More specifically, just the W3C/Apple TouchEvents API.

They didn't want to ship different versions of Chrome for touch/non-touch, so they made it so they only enable the touch APIs if they detect a touch device on startup (discussed here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=152149).

So now your test will work again... BUT - if you want to future-proof yourself, you might want to change your approach. Here's why:

1. Not all browsers will perform this switch that Chrome does.

2. Touch capability is becoming a dynamic feature: with Microsoft Surface etc you can unplug from keyboard and mouse and go touch-only, users may have touch monitors connected via KVM switches which won't be detected at startup, etc. Browser vendors don't want to make APIs appear and disappear - that'd be a nightmare - so at some point the Chrome guys will probably permanently enable the TouchEvents APIs on all devices. That test will start throwing "false positives" again.

Instead, look at the PointerEvents API, which gives a common event interface for mouse, touch and stylus inputs. If you're thinking of making buttons bigger for touch interfaces etc, there's a pointer media query spec too (and a hover one), which will appear in browsers soon - this differentiates between different accuracies of input devices - none/coarse/fine - and being dynamic will let you adjust your styles based on the connected pointer devices, as they're connected/disconnected. Very cool.

Modernizr v3.0 (dropping within the next few weeks) will have a couple of relevant changes here:

• A detect for the PointerEvents API is being added
• Modernizr.touch is being renamed Modernizr.touchevents to better represent what it means

So I'd consider using PointerEvents if available (which it already is in IE10), falling back to a Modernizr.touchevents switch if not.