Pointer Events is an odd case. It's a Microsoft-backed spec that only Microsoft supports. Apple won't implement it, Google won't, Mozilla's implementation is unfinished. Touch Events is also weird: only Google supports that.
Google, per the Chrome rep quoted in the article, prefers PE from a technical perspective, and only doesn't support it because it won't be universal because of Apple's resistance.
Unfinished means WIP, it doesn't mean that Mozilla doesn't support it the way Apple doesn't. Apple is the only barrier to adoption here.
See below: the Chrome team have other (performance) objections.
Exactly, you've hit the nail on the head.
It seems a bit strange to single out Apple when there are plenty of other vendors also not implementing it.
That said, I know very little about the history of mobile browser development; have Apple historically dragged their feet on mobile Safari?
Pointer Events was first proposed by Microsoft as an alternative solution. It was also a more general specification; while Touch Events was designed for touch and touch alone, Pointer Events allowed developers to use similar code to handle touch, stylus/pen, and mouse inputs. Pointer Events also addressed certain problems with Touch Events, such as a 300 millisecond delay before responding to taps in order to disambiguate between single and double taps.
Then the patent issue was resolved — W3C determined that Apple's patents didn't cover Touch Events anyway so they could release a Touch Events spec. All this time work on Pointer Events continued in parallel, backed not just by Microsoft, but also by Mozilla, jQuery, and Google.
Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer both implement Pointer Events. In 2012 Microsoft contributed code to WebKit, the rendering engine then used by both Chrome and Safari. While Apple never enabled the code, Google offered its support, and this continued even after Google forked WebKit to produce its Blink engine. It looked as if three of the four major browsers were on track to support the specification.
Then Google pulled support in August. Their stated rationale was that because Apple was unlikely to ever support Pointer Events and Apple is the dominate force in the mobile web; Touch Events would always be required. It's a decision that hasn't gone over well with web developers, just look at the comments on the Chromium bug tracker.
That's only one of their reasons.
https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=162757#c...
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1qRqLKQjOnGgrM-UkMAb2...
In particular, see the notes in slide 6. They have several reasons that include performance, flexibility, and compatibility.
Very briefly, pointer events has 3 main drawbacks relative to the alternative:
1) Mobile-first web: Pointer events would likely never supplant touch events on the web (especially without support from Safari). Since touch events are here to stay, supporting another largely redundant input model has a high long-term complexity cost on the web platform.
2) Performance: The hit testing model required by pointer events imposes a non-trivial performance penalty (hit test on every movement event) that neither Android, iOS or touch events has. We're not willing to add any feature that increases the web's performance disadvantage relative to native mobile platforms.
3) Richness: Pointer events requires that scrolling and event handling are mutually exclusive. This precludes some UI effects which are common on on mobile platforms (eg. pull to refresh). Recently strong developer feedback has lead us to change Chrome in the opposite direction here - enabling event handling while scrolling (see issue 293467 ).
Amazing how some things have changed in just the last decade between the browser makers.
Yes. Here's another example: http://www.raymondcamden.com/2014/09/25/IndexedDB-on-iOS-8-B...
Every other browser supports IndexedDB for years, then Apple finally releases support for it and it's completely broken in multiple unfathomably bizarre ways. Still hasn't been fixed.
Here's my experience from building a fairly complex app that VERY heavily uses IndexedDB. If you follow the IndexedDB spec, you'll wind up with something that is 99% working in Firefox and Chrome. If you happen to run into that 1%, you'll find that Firefox and Chrome devs are very responsive and want to make it work. IE is a little buggy and is missing a couple features, but it's not impossible to work around them. Unfortunately the IE dev team is less responsive and it's not clear if/when they will fix things. But to support Safari, you'd have to do things that are utterly horrifying. It's basically not worth even trying.
No need to single anyone out. They're all equally guilty.
So it's a case of Not Invented Here? or more accurate: Invented By the Enemy?
I just hope that Mozilla will get a proper implementation of Pointer Events so I can use that. It's sad to see Apple leveraging it's market share like this, but I can't say I'm surprised.