Mousedown events delayed or sluggish on mobile

September 30, 2016 [Elm, JavaScript, Programming, Tech]

I am learning about Elm and web apps by writing a little game called sootl.

It's all SVGs animated with requestAnimationFrame(), and you control your player by clicking or touch the screen.

Everything seemed good on desktop browsers, but on mobile it took an age for the mousedown event to trigger when you touched.

Update: Thanks to @zatnosk on mastodon.social for letting me know there is a better way: 300ms tap delay, gone away. Short answer: add a <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"> tag inside your <head> tag.

It turns out that under certain circumstances, some mobile devices wait after the first touch happens to see whether you are going to swipe before they emit the mousedown event.

So, the short answer was to listen for touchstart events as well as mousedown ones. In Elm that looked like this change: e77e055e470c38489657ecaf5edc54a4e5f85782.