Detecting that the browser has no mouse and is touch-only

Question

I\'m developing a webapp (not a website with pages of interesting text) with a very different interface for touch (your finger hides the screen when you click) and mouse (re

Answer 1

Ran some tests on various PC's, Linux's, iPhone, Android phones and tabs. Weird that there is no easy bullet-proof solution. Problem arises when some that have Touch and no mouse still present Touch and Mouse events to application. Since do want to support mouse-only and touch-only instances, want to process both, but this causes double occurrences of user interactions. If can know mouse is not present on device, then can know to ignore fake/inserted mouse events. Tried setting flag if MouseMove is encountered, but some browsers throw fake MouseMove as well as MouseUp and MouseDown. Tried examining timestamps but figured this was too risky. Bottom line: I found the browsers that created the fake mouse events always inserted a single MouseMove just prior to the inserted MouseDown. In 99.99% of my cases, when running on a system that has a real mouse, there are multiple consecutive MouseMove events - at least two. So, keep track of whether system encounters two consecutive MouseMove events and declare there is no mouse present if this condition is never met. This is probably too simple, but its working on all my test setups. Think I'll stick with it until I find a better solution. - Jim W