1235207 - TouchEvent support for Firefox in Windows is 100% busted

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Core :: DOM: Events, defect)

Description

[jerryj]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/47.0.2526.106 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce:

Find any TouchEvent example online and visit the web page using Firefox.  For example, go to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Touch_events and click on the "see it live" link.


Actual results:

Absolutely nothing.  Firefox does not send touch events.  Visit the same example using Chrome and it works.



Expected results:

TouchEvent's should have been sent.

Comment 1

[YF (Yang)]

WFM on Fx44b2 & 46.0a1 (2015-12-26) Win10, with Simulate touch events (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Tools/Responsive_Design_View).

Comment 2

[jerryj]

Please reread the original bug report (it has nothing to do with "Responsive Design View").

Firefox does not work on Windows touch displays, using actual, real fingers touching the touch display.  Touch events ARE registered, but mouse events are sent, not touch events.

Visit https://mdn.mozillademos.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Touch_events$samples/Example?revision=979019 in Chrome, click Initialize, place five fingers down on and screen and move -- and it works.  Now, do the same thing in Firefox, and the result is a BLANK screen.  It does not work.  Simple test.

window.TouchEvent is non-null, so it 'should' be working in Firefox, but does not, using Mozilla's own touch example code.

So... Use Mozilla's own sample code, in a real Firefox browser session, using a real touch screen (so no simulation is involved), on Windows (mine is Win 8.1), and drag MULTIPLE fingers.

Comment 3

[jerryj]

Sometime between r38 and r39 touch events just stopped working.

From r25 to r38, using the touch screen also improperly generates mouse events.

Comment 4

[Paul Oiegas [:poiegas], PM for (Ecosystem QA, Services QA, WebCompat QA, Ads QA, and Solo QA teams)]

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; WOW64; rv:46.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/46.0

Hi guys,

I have managed to reproduce this issue on a Dell XPS 12 device (windows 10 x64) using latest Firefox release (43.0.3) and latest Nightly build (46.0a1-20160105030211). I have also tried to reproduce this on Firefox 38.0, 37.0, 30.0 and 25.0 and it behaves the same so I don't think you pointed the right versions. Or if this ever worked.

Considering this I will mark this issue as NEW and update its component. If you consider that this is not the right component, feel free to change it with a more appropriate one.


Thank,
Paul

Comment 5

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

We support touch events on mobile. That MDN pages says "As of Gecko 24.0 (Firefox 24.0 / Thunderbird 24.0 / SeaMonkey 2.21), the touch events support introduced with Gecko 18.0 (Firefox 18.0 / Thunderbird 18.0 / SeaMonkey 2.15) has been disabled on the desktop version of Firefox"


I don't have a touch screen atm, but I thought also Edge supports touch events only on mobile.

Comment 6

[Andrew Overholt [:overholt]]

I can confirm that Chrome release supports touch events at https://mdn.mozillademos.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Touch_events$samples/Example?revision=979019 and Nightly does not on a Surface Book.

Comment 7

[Andrew Overholt [:overholt]]

Edge doesn't seem to support touch events (at least with the URL in comment 6) on the same Surface Book. Neither does IE 11.

Comment 8

[jerryj]

Microsoft fully supports touch in the web browser, on the desktop, via PointerEvent (now a W3C Recommendation).

Google Chrome fully supports touch in the web browser, on the desktop, via TouchEvent.

Firefox is the odd browser out.  No touch support on the desktop.  But it can be turned on via a flag.  But after doing so, it does not work, at all!  But worst of all, touch in Firefox (when the events did fire way back when) always fires mouse events regardless of any touch event processing.

The attitude that 'touch is for mobile' only has to change, because that is not the reality today, as some people there do realize, as the full comment was "As a temporary work around, we've disabled exposing W3C touch interfaces on devices that do not support touch input. But this is temporary since Win8 is going to change the device landscape over the next year or two", made on 2012/10/30.

In case people have not noticed, yes, touch is everywhere now on the desktop in 2016.

Firefox not supporting touch on the desktop is very problematic.

Comment 9

[Olli Pettay [:smaug][[e-mail]]]

We're aiming to get pointer events working everywhere. And they are not about touch. Pointer events are pointer events, dealing both mouse and touch and other types of input.

Enabling touch events on desktop broke several web sites. AFAIK that is also the reason why touch events aren't enabled in desktop Edge.

Comment 10

[jerryj]

Of course Edge supports touch.  And it works using the Mozilla demo.

Under Firefox, Touch is broken.  You can't even turn it on. It is busted.

last man standing, please turn off the lights...

Comment 11

[Kartikaya Gupta (email:[e-mail])]

Now that touch events are riding the trains I'm going to call this fixed in 52. Note that e10s still needs to be enabled in 52 to get proper touch events support.