Fennec/Features/touch

Feature	Status	ETA	Owner
Touch Events	Implementation in progress	2011-07-01	Thomas Arend

Summary

Expose touch events to content for better interaction with web pages and services, and compatibility with WebKit/Opera and existing web content.

Team

• Wes Johnson - Mobile Front-end
• Olli Pettay (smaug) - Platform
• Matt Brubeck - W3C spec

Release Requirements

• No performance regressions on non-touch-event pages.
• Acceptable performance of touch events in content. (Need more precise criteria?)
• Sidebar (or some alternate form of navigation) is still accessible on pages that use touch events.

Next Steps

• Finish patches and get reviews.
• Write automated tests and do manual compatibility testing.
• Experiment with different ways of allowing sidebar panning.
• Performance testing and optimization.
• Send spec feedback to W3C Web Events working group.

Related Bugs & Dependencies

• bug 544614 - Tracking bug for touch events in Fennec

Designs

This is our new gesture set, as mapped to current browser features. We will also have on-screen touch buttons/targets, but we need to map all features to a gestures for accessibility reasons (more details on that soon).

[Browser Feature] = [Gesture]

Back = Two-finger Swipe Left [1]

Forward = Double-finger Swipe Right

Scroll Down = Swipe Down

Scroll Up = Swipe Up

Pan = Drag

Kinetic Pan = Swipe

Goals/Use Cases

• Expose single-touch events to content in Fennec.
• Don't let pages completely block navigation or sidebar panning.
• Compatibility with existing pages like Google Maps.
• Conformance with a subset of W3C Touch Events editor's draft.
• Compatibility with a common subset of Safari/Android/WebKit functionality.

Non-Goals

• Expose multiple simultaneous touches to content (will be done in a future version).
• 100% conformance with W3C Touch Events spec (will be completed in future versions).
• 100% compatibility with Safari or other browsers.
• Enable W3C touch events in desktop Firefox (will be done in future versions).

Other Documentation

• W3C Touch Events editor's draft specification

Legend (remove if you like)

	Healthy: feature is progressing as expected.
	Blocked: feature is currently blocked.
	At Risk: feature is at risk of missing its targeted release.
ETA	Estimated date for completion of the current feature task. Overall ETA for the feature is the product release date.