Caveats: I suck at accessibility, so I am probably wrong on a lot of things.
Chrome 32 on Android removes the 300ms delay on touch events for responsive sites. This disables double-tap zoom, leaving pinch to zoom the only way to zoom content. This is an accessibility concern, as for some users double tap zoom may have been the only way they were able to zoom web pages.
For unimpaired users, a 300ms delay on link clicks/interactions with sites provides no benefit, and creates a sluggish UI. Many website owners, aware of the impacts of slow UIs, and trying to compete with native apps, used tools like FastClick to override this behaviour by removing the delay. Removing the delay at the browser level negates the need for tools like fastclick, makes chrome feel faster (competitive win for chrome I guess), and improves performance overall as fastclick has scroll performance implications.
A portion of users, who find pinch-to-zoom difficult, will now potentially be left out of the web. While businesses might not be bothered in the short term, this is clearly not a long term good for the web/society.
Chrome 30 on android has an option to force allow zooming on all sites as an accessibility option. If this still exists in Chrome 32, I'd argue this may actually be a step forewards for accessibility. Why?:
- Currently, "dumb" website owners use fast click to disable the 300ms delay: which even with "force allow zooming" enabled breaks double tap zoom.
- As the 300ms delay goes away, website owners can remove fast click, as it will be redundant, which, assuming chrome keeps "force allow zooming" will mean that double tap zoom works again.
Now, the above means that impaired users have to enable an accessibility setting to be able to use their browser, which is a bummer, but at least it puts them back in control if we get rid of hacks like fast click.
"I'm still intrigued as to whether the other browser vendors follow suit or whether Chrome ends up the only browser vendor without that as a gesture"
I'd bet on Firefox doing the same. They dropped the 300ms delay on no-zoom pages as we did.
Apple? Less likely. Even on no-zoom pages, double-tap is a scroll gesture, which is really odd IMO. They don't seem interested in dropping the delay. Maybe [baseless and outrageous conspiracy theory warning] they have a financial interest in the web feeling slow, making developing native apps more appealing.
@sherred Regarding pointer events, the touch-action property isn't a fix. If you set it to none, yes you lose double-tap and zoom, but you also lose scrolling. You'd only use it on elements where you want javascript to have complete say over the touch events, eg a painting canvas.
The pointerup event does what you want, it's like touchend but won't fire if the browser does something with touch events itself (eg, scrolling). However, if we rely on that, developers have to code it in for everything they want to be faster, and that means putting js listeners on things like links, just to speed them up. What we did in Chrome beta sped up large areas of the existing web, which is way more valuable.
That said, pointer events are brilliant. MS did a fantastic job. We're implementing them.