Event sequence when long tapping an image

[lpd-au]

I wrote a quick demo to see which pointer events and compatibility mouse events are fired in each mobile browser when long tapping on an <img>: https://output.jsbin.com/zeroqih

Below is what I found:

Desktop (FF mouse)	Firefox	Chrome	Safari (wtc: none)	Safari (wtc: default)
pointerover	pointerover	pointerover	pointerover	pointerover
pointerenter	pointerenter	pointerenter	pointerenter	pointerenter
	pointerdown	pointerdown	pointerdown	pointerdown
pointermove	(pause)	pointermove	(pause)	(pause)
		... (approx 20-50x)
		pointermove
mouseover	mouseover	mouseover	mouseover	mouseover
mouseenter	mouseenter	mouseenter	mouseenter	mouseenter
mousemove	mousemove	mousemove
(RMB depressed)
pointerdown
mousedown			mousedown	mousedown
(pause until release)			(pause until release)	(pause)
pointerup			pointerup
mouseup
auxclick
contextmenu	contextmenu	contextmenu
	pointercancel	pointercancel		pointercancel
pointerout	pointerout	pointerout	pointerout
pointerleave	pointerleave	pointerleave	pointerleave
mouseout
mouseleave

The notable differences from my pov are:

1. Safari for iOS never fires a contextmenu event, despite opening a very similar image-specific menu to the Android browsers (when -webkit-touch-callout is absent).
2. Both Android browsers fire a mousemove event but Safari for iOS always fires a mousedown event instead (although without a mouseup).
3. No matter how precisely you lower and raise your finger, Chrome for Android fires a bunch of pointermove events (I guess for pressure changes?), whereas Firefox for Android and Safari for iOS typically fire none unless you jiggle around your finger.

Are 1 and 2 in particular currently allowed by the spec, and in the working group's opinion, should they be?

I have a legacy site that for mouse input, currently shows a html tooltip when hovering over a custom button. To provide more reasonable behaviour for touch input, I figured I'd show the tooltip when the button is either panned over or long tapped. With the differences above, this proved way more difficult than I expected:

• Cancelling the native context menu is handled by preventing the default action of an event or adding a CSS property in different browsers.
• The events fired when the tap has been held long enough to become a long tap are different in different browsers.
• Even after accounting for the above two factors, some browsers will then show the tooltip almost immediately at the start of the tap because they fire pointermove events that others don't, even when the user's finger is stationary and lifting it would trigger a click event on the button. Resolving this requires listening for a 4th event type and tracking state.

[patrickhlauke]

The behavior of long-tapping (and how user agents choose to map it/implement it) is not directly defined in the PE specification itself.