1437372 - Clicking links with small touch areas may be difficult

Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 1618532

(Firefox for Android Graveyard :: General, enhancement, P3)

Description

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Apparently some people complain about this: https://www.reddit.com/r/firefox/comments/7wnr2a/why_is_touch_response_so_bad_in_firefox_for/

In theory that's what the "ui.mouse.radius" set of options (https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/80ca8e45becbf8f38a06d94d14899947ed834c4d/mobile/android/app/mobile.js#412-418) is for, but of course the current implementation has its own set of problems regarding text selection and click event handlers, which is why it was turned off in bug 1247095 in the first place.

Comment 1

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

FWIW I always turn on ui.mouse.radius because without it the browser is pretty unusable for me.

Comment 2

[David Bolter [:davidb] (NeedInfo me for attention)]

I'm curious what the Ux should be for this papercut, where pinch/zoom might not be honored by a web site, and there are too many small targets in a cluster.

Comment 3

[Anthony Lam (:antlam) Find me, @antlam on Slack!]

This is interesting, but I'd like to see more investigation here before deciding on the priority of it against other items in the backlog. Definitely something to keep an eye on though.

In terms of paper cuts, I think we might not find an ideal solution here since it also has a lot to do with the website.

We did work on a feature before to enlarge the area with some "magnification UI" but that had problems of its own too. 

See https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1198463

Comment 4

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Browsing through Chrome's current list of flags, I notice they're currently experimenting with something called "Touch adjustment - Refine the position of a touch gesture in order to compensate for touches having poor resolution compared to a mouse."

Comment 5

[Felipe Lessa]

This is the biggest paper cut affecting me. For example, it's almost impossible to hit the "[-]" targets that close Hacker News comment trees without zooming in (e.g., try https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20982161). It's very frustrating.

Comment 6

[Botond Ballo [:botond]]

(In reply to Felipe Lessa from comment #5)

This is the biggest paper cut affecting me. For example, it's almost impossible to hit the "[-]" targets that close Hacker News comment trees without zooming in (e.g., try https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20982161). It's very frustrating.

Does setting ui.mouse.radius.enabled like Kats mentioned in comment 1 help?

Comment 7

[Felipe Lessa]

(In reply to Botond Ballo [:botond] from comment #6)

(In reply to Felipe Lessa from comment #5)

This is the biggest paper cut affecting me. For example, it's almost impossible to hit the "[-]" targets that close Hacker News comment trees without zooming in (e.g., try https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20982161). It's very frustrating.

Does setting ui.mouse.radius.enabled like Kats mentioned in comment 1 help?

Oh, wow! It sure does work! Now Hacker News is usable, and bugzilla here as well. Thanks!

Why is this option not enabled by default? Haven't seen any issues in the 15 min I spent trying it.

Comment 8

[Jan Henning [:JanH]]

Why is this option not enabled by default? Haven't seen any issues in the 15 min I spent trying it.

See bug 1542381 comment 11.

Comment 9

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

Duping to bug 1618532 which turned on mouse event retargeting by default on Android.