If you’re a Google Chrome user on a Windows tablet, you may have noticed that scrolling can be a little quirky with just touch inputs. Google’s plan to fix this involves borrowing a feature already in Internet Explorer.
Specifically, Google will implement Microsoft’s Pointer Events API into Blink, the rendering engine used by Chromium. Pointer Events unifies mouse, stylus and touch inputs into a single API, as distinct from having separate calls for each input type.
Google had previously stated it wouldn’t develop around Pointer Events, utilising instead resources such as Touch Events, used in Apple’s Safari Browser, but in a post to the Chromium Developer Mailing List, Google Chrome software engineer Rick Byers stated that the intent is to build Pointer Events into future versions of the Blink engine. It doesn’t automatically mean that Pointer Events will be part of Chrome quickly, as Byers also notes that there a several non-trivial issues to deal with if they’re to build around the Pointer Events API.
Chromium team reverses course, will adopt IE’s merged mouse, touch APIs [Ars Technica]
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