Web-facing PSA: mouse on Android stops firing TouchEvents from M56

[Mustaq Ahmed]

Changes:

From M56, a mouse on an Android M (or later) device:

- will no longer fire TouchEvents, and

- will fire a consistent sequence of MouseEvents with appropriate buttons & other properties.

Details:

Until M55, Android low-level mouse events in Chrome primarily followed an event path designed for touch interactions. However, since touch events cannot support hover, hovering mousemoves followed a separate path. The whole design had quite a few terrible side-effects:

A. Mouse interactions fired TouchEvents.

B. The MouseEvents fired to JS were actually the compat mouse events fired for touch interactions, so:

  - all mouse buttons appeared as left buttons, and

  - canceled TouchEvents suppressed MouseEvents.

C. Not of these happened to hovering mousemoves.

We fixed these problems by dispatching all mouse events through a dedicated low-level path so that Blink receives all these events through its regular MouseEvent path. This automatically fixes missing PointerEvents for mouse on Android.

- Landed patch

- Design doc

Risks

Mouse on Android is not common, so the risk is low. Some websites could be unresponsive to mouse because they don't have proper mouse event handlers in mobile-specific codepaths; they will still work for touch interactions.

[Kartikaya Gupta]

FYI we did this in Firefox for Android recently, but got some pushback
because it broke mouse-drag scrolling on TV devices, and so we ended
up reverting the change. Details at
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1294707. That being said,
our mouse-to-touch conversion sounds a little different from yours, so
maybe you won't have the same problem?

Cheers,
kats

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[Ian Clelland]

On Tue, Nov 15, 2016 at 11:09 AM, Mustaq Ahmed <mus...@chromium.org> wrote:

Risks

Mouse on Android is not common, so the risk is low. Some websites could be unresponsive to mouse because they don't have proper mouse event handlers in mobile-specific codepaths; they will still work for touch interactions.

I've seen this same behaviour on several sites on a Chromebook Pixel as well -- (www.pokemon.com/en/pokedex was the most recent, but there have been others). There may be a library for generic touch support that is choosing to enable mouse event listeners only if touch support is unavailable.

I'm not certain whether there's a good way to measure the size of that group, but there definitely are sites which will not work with mouse after this change.

[Joe Medley]

Mustaq,

Do you think this will break anybody's web pages? If so, you may want to create a Chrome Status entry for it, and I'll need to include it in my next deprecations and removals article.

Joe Medley | Technical Writer, Chrome DevRel | jme...@google.com | 816-678-7195

If an API's not documented it doesn't exist.

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[Mustaq Ahmed]

Here is the Chrome Status entry.

[Joe Medley]

Thanks.

[lx.s...@gmail.com]

would it be possibel to implemet the "old" mouse functionality in flags? Navigation only with mouse is now nearly impossible!

[Rick Byers]

Do you mean just that it's hard to scroll if your mouse doesn't have a wheel?  Or is there perhaps some other issue we're not aware of?

[lx.s...@gmail.com]

Not exactly, I mean now there is no way of zooming or moving webpages to the left or to the right by using mouse only. Even marking some text by using mouse is not possible with this new interface solution.
Please try it by your own. From my point of view the mouse input become useless, because you will need additional touch interface all the time for zooming, marking and horizontal navigation.

[PhistucK]

On all of the websites? On certain websites (probably websites that are meant to be viewed using phones and are controlling the scrolling manually)?

The former is unexpected, the latter is expected, as, unfortunately, developers listen to touch events (rather than pointer events or mouse events) when they want to control the scrolling manually. That is a website issue.

☆PhistucK

On Sat, Dec 17, 2016 at 11:05 AM, <lx.s...@gmail.com> wrote:

Not exactly, I mean now there is no way of zooming or moving webpages to the left or to the right by using mouse only. Even marking some text by using mouse is not possible with this new interface solution.
Please try it by your own. From my point of view the mouse input become useless, because you will need additional touch interface all the time for zooming, marking and horizontal navigation.

[lx.s...@gmail.com]

Yes on all websites there is no way to zoom or navigate/scroll horizontal by only using mouse input. Also marking text and copy&paste by mouse is not possible any longer. Thats definetly an issue linked to this change becuase in V55 it works like touch gestures in V56 mouse support works only for wheel and the 3-buttons desktop like.Please think on all the tablet users which are using a mouse and now need additionaly to use the touch interface for marking text, copy&paste, horizontal navigation/scroling and zooming web pages.

[PhistucK]

On Sat, Dec 17, 2016 at 1:14 PM, <lx.s...@gmail.com> wrote:

in V56 mouse support works only for wheel and the 3-buttons desktop like

​I am not sure I am following - what kind of mouse are you using?​

☆PhistucK

[lx.s...@gmail.com]

I am using a standart 3-button + wheel usb optical mouse. like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Dell-3-button-Optical-Scroll-XN966/dp/B0029ND59O

[PhistucK]

Oh, right, I thought you meant that you are not using a three-button mouse.

Sounds like a bug, then.

You can search crbug.com for an existing issue and star it. If you cannot find one, file a new issue using the "New issue" link on the same page.

Please, do not add a "+1" or "Me too" or "Confirmed" (or similar) comment. It just wastes the time of Chrome engineers and sends unnecessary e-mails to all of the people who starred the issue.

You can reply with a link to the found or created issue and might get triaged (and fixed) faster.

Thank you.

☆PhistucK

On Sat, Dec 17, 2016 at 1:25 PM, <lx.s...@gmail.com> wrote:

I am using a standart 3-button + wheel usb optical mouse. like this one: https://www.amazon.com/Dell-3-button-Optical-Scroll-XN966/dp/B0029ND59O

[Dave Tapuska]

Are you using a hardware keyboard as well? Ie. Do shift scroll and ctrl scroll work?

[lx.s...@gmail.com]

Thanks for the fast reply first of all.
I have reported that issue, you can find it here:
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=675339&q=mouse&colspec=ID%20Pri%20M%20Stars%20ReleaseBlock%20Component%20Status%20Owner%20Summary%20OS%20Modified

But I do not htink it is a real bug, because it works perfectly like the description here:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mpBR7J7kgTXvp0QACVjhxtwNJ7bgGoTMmxfxN2dupGg/mobilebasic

Therefore I guess it's an incomplete implementation and a not consideration of using mouse only.
Together with keyboard you are able to horizontal navigation via arrow keys but still no zooming (CTRL+wheel or SHIFT+wheel does not work) and even marking some text by mouse does not work. So If you really want to implement the feeling of a real desktop (mouse+keyboard) on Chrome for Android, then using only a mouse on a tablet will become useless!

Thank you.

[Dave Tapuska]

Have you tried enabling pan scrolling for Android? It works like pan scrolling on Windows. It may be what you want. You press click the middle button. 

[lx.s...@gmail.com]

I tried but pan scrolling like in sketch up with long click middle button (wheel) does not work.

[Mustaq Ahmed]

A quick update: we held back the proposed change from M56 at the last moment to address user concerns around (non-web-facing) UI problems.

Now that mouse on Android works for text selection & wheel scrolling (and keyboard zoom also just works), we are finally exposing the proposed change on M58.

I have updated the chromestatus entry accordingly.

Hooray for Android mouse on the web!

[acm.c...@gmail.com]