Touch events sent to a page can be either blocking or non-blocking. A blocking touch event means that the page calls preventDefault() to prevent the browser from turning the touch into a scroll. TouchMove events start out blocking until the first event in a sequence isn’t preventDefaulted and causes scrolling. Chromium currently reverts the touchevent stream back to blocking so that pages can override browser default overscrolling behavior. This feature causes overscrolling to be non-blocking.
Demo
Documentation
Specification
Proposal in a personal repository, no adoption from community
Status in Chromium
Enabled by default
(tracking bug)
Consensus & Standardization
After a feature ships in Chrome, the values listed here are not guaranteed to be up to date.
- Shipped/Shipping
- Shipped/Shipping
- No signals
Owners
Intent to Prototype url
Intent to Prototype threadLast updated on 2022-01-14
Comments
Blocking touch events are bad for performance because the browser may need to wait on a reply from the busy main thread before scrolling. Blocking touchMoves during the overscroll behavior predates the CSS overscroll-behavior API which allows declaratively disabling browser overscroll behaviors. The “revert to blocking on overscroll” behavior is particularly problematic in the common case of infinite scrolling streams where the user may reach the end of loaded content but can continue to scroll once more content is loaded. This proposal is to avoid reverting to blocking touchmoves on overscrolling so that touchmoves are never cancelable once scrolling begins. Pages can use overscroll-behavior to block browser overscrolling actions like Pull-to-Refresh and Overscroll Glow. Internal data shows that roughly 8.5% sessions with scrolls encounter this at least briefly and we also have a telemetry benchmark that regularly hits this issue. This was landed on June 9th in crrev/c/2182426, and then suggested we send this intent to ship instead because of the user facing behaviour change. If this isn’t approved we’ll revert it before the beta branch point, but no complaints or regressions from this change so far.