How to detect if a device has mouse support?

Question

I currently use the following test (taken out of Modernizr) to detect touch support:

function is_touch_device() {
    var bool;
    if((\'ontouchstart\' in w         


        

Answer 1

There is no immediate way of knowing, you'll have to wait for a touch event or a mouse event.

Presuming you want to detect either mouse or touch you can do the following: listen for touchstart and mousemove (the latter can fire on touch devices without an actual mouse). Whichever one fires first is 99% bound to be what you're looking for.

This does not take in account devices that actually have both.

document.addEventListener('mousemove', onMouseMove, true)
document.addEventListener('touchstart', onTouchStart, true)
function onTouchStart(){
  removeListeners()
  // touch detected: do stuff
}
function onMouseMove(){
  removeListeners()
  // mouse detected: do stuff
}
function removeListeners(){
  document.removeEventListener('mousemove', onMouseMove, true)
  document.removeEventListener('touchstart', onTouchStart, true)
}