Do chrome and firefox support pointer event (pressure, tilt, touch, etc.) any soon?

Question

I am writing web app on canvas that suppose to support tablet and touch pressure. However, if I am not mistaken, I believe only IE10 support these pointer events. I would want to know if chrome and firefox are going to support it any soon?

Answer 1

Now the pointer events are working in google chrome!

From the Can I use website it looks like the support for pointer events is currently enabled and working on chrome as of version 55 (December 2016). Just tested the functionality on Windows 10 with Google Chrome version 59 and my wacom tablet pressure is working. Tested on Ubuntu with Google Chrome, latest version, but the pressure is not registered.

It looks like pointer events are only supported on Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 10+, Edge and Opera. But I hadn't tested Opera, so I don't know if it supports pressure.

Answer 2

I just tested this on the Surface Studio with the pen in Chrome 58 (Windows 10). It generates the pointer events but the pressure is always 0.5. It doesn't register any variance. IE correctly returns varying values for pressure.

Answer 3

Edit:

The Blink team have changed their minds again on 25 March 2015. They decided to implement Pointer Events after all. At the time of writing, Apple is the only major browser vendor opposed to implementing Pointer Events.

Original answer:

The Blink team (meaning Chrome) said on 15 Aug 2014 they will not implement this, marking issue 162757 as WontFix. Here's their full explanation. Quoting:

Very briefly, pointer events has 3 main drawbacks relative to the alternative:

1) Mobile-first web: Pointer events would likely never supplant touch events on the web (especially without support from Safari). Since touch events are here to stay, supporting another largely redundant input model has a high long-term complexity cost on the web platform.

2) Performance: The hit testing model required by pointer events imposes a non-trivial performance penalty (hit test on every movement event) that neither Android, iOS or touch events has. We're not willing to add any feature that increases the web's performance disadvantage relative to native mobile platforms.

3) Richness: Pointer events requires that scrolling and event handling are mutually exclusive. This precludes some UI effects which are common on on mobile platforms (eg. pull to refresh). Recently strong developer feedback has lead us to change Chrome in the opposite direction here - enabling event handling while scrolling (see issue 293467 ).

Answer 4

The API is still in draft, but it is getting closer to being released as a W3C Recommendation.

There is a prototype Chromium build created with a patch from Microsoft adding the MSPointer events API, and progress is being made on the Webkit implementation, so it looks like adoption is moving forward.

Microsoft has also contributed a demonstration patch to Firefox and it is being integrated with the main trunk. (Thanks apsillers)

The timeline remains uncertain, but all signs point to eventual adoption by all browsers.