

Pointer Events Now in Firefox Nightly - tga_d
https://hacks.mozilla.org/2015/08/pointer-events-now-in-firefox-nightly/

======
userbinator
_pointermove_

"The page at xxxxx would like to track the movements of your mouse pointer. Do
you wish to allow this action?"

I wonder how many pages are doing this already without their users noticing...

~~~
anon4
Reminds me of the old Win 95 joke:

    
    
        ┏━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┓
        ┃ You have moved the mouse pointer ┃
        ┃                                  ┃
        ┃ Windows will have to restart to  ┃
        ┃        apply this change         ┃
        ┃                                  ┃
        ┃               [OK]               ┃
        ┗━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━┛

~~~
justwannasing
Wait! Did they fix that in Windows 10?

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jasonkester
I often wonder if browser vendors, or _anybody_ really, believes that this
sort of thing makes our world better.

All it does is add a third case that every application needs to support from
here on out. You need to do your sniffing, then register mouse events or touch
events or pointer events as necessary. And write similar but different code
paths for each case. And you need to maintain and test all three of those
branches for ever.

It's that XKCD comic. And that Joel blog post from fifteen years ago.
Implemented with no irony whatsoever by people who seem not to have read
either.

~~~
eterm
How about you link which xkcd [0] comic and Joel [1] blog post you're talking
about rather than assuming we know.

[0] It's not capitalised

[1] Spolsky, I assume.

~~~
jasonkester
Sorry about that. I expected that the Internet would have sorted that out for
me by now. Googling:

[https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)

[http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html)

~~~
DiThi
Joel's article is barely relevant now. The main problem has been layout
discrepancies, and the pages were made for IE+others back then. Nowadays it's
very difficult to step on something not properly supported in your target
browsers (except if your target includes old versions of IE). I develop
exclusively on Chrome with a lot of fancy HTML5 stuff and _very rarely_ I have
to tweak something for Firefox, IE11, Safari, Opera...

It's a completely different scenario than when I did web dev in 2008. Also,
Joel article is not fifteen years old, it's nine.

~~~
jasonkester
Sounds like you're not pushing things as much as you used to in '08\. The
situation is no different today than it was in 1996 when I started this ride.
There are sections of my current codebase that switch for iOS 4, 6, 7, 8+,
android and desktop Chrome, working around idiosyncracies of each.

There's also IE, Firefox and "am I running from the local filesystem" checks
in there. All necessary to work around real differences in implementation in
the most current crop of "modern" browsers.

It's a rare feature that I can ship that works out of the box in every
browser. But, as it was 20 years ago, this is the job we signed up for. I just
wish people stopped going out of their way to add more unnecessary things that
I need to special case around.

~~~
tuxracer
As a side note, new versions of iOS get adopted extremely fast. It's unlikely
you need to maintain code to support more than a single version of iOS back.
[https://developer.apple.com/support/app-
store/](https://developer.apple.com/support/app-store/)

------
nindalf
Available in IE11, Edge and Firefox for now -
[http://caniuse.com/#feat=pointer](http://caniuse.com/#feat=pointer)

------
jbrantly
I'm apparently a bit outdated, but it seems that Chrome is also now planning
on implementing pointer events [0] after saying they wouldn't. Does anyone
know if webkit has budged on their stance?

[0]
[https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink...](https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/#!topic/blink-
dev/ODWmcKNQl0I)

------
mozumder
I really don't like the idea of a common pointer event.

Mouse interaction and touch interaction are as different as mouse interaction
and keyboard interaction. They really do need to be treated completely
differently, with different user experience models and code paths.

~~~
pdkl95
What makes you think this is limited to only mouse vs touch? By design the
HTML+CSS+DOM platform only provides an abstraction that may _or may not_ have
a meaningful mapping to the actual interface of the User Agent.

You really shouldn't be assuming you know _anything_ about the interface and
only use pointer events in the most minimal, generic way possible. To that
end, this new "pointer event" may be useful. If you want better, more detailed
pointer information, you should use a platform that provides it such as
writing a native app.

/* the same goes for reimplementing widgets like scrollbars: don't, that's the
job of the User Agent */

~~~
mozumder
This is dangerous, because you have to design for use model, not a generic
model.

If you design for a generic model, you're going to end up with a crappy
interface.

