javascript - Eliminate 300ms delay on click events in mobile Safari

Question

I've read that mobile Safari has a 300ms delay on click events from the time the link/button is clicked to the time the event fires. The reason for the delay is to wait to see if the user intends to double-click, but from a UX perspective waiting 300ms is often undesirable.

One solution to eliminate this 300ms delay is to use jQuery Mobile "tap" handling. Unfortunately I'm not familiar with this framework and don't want to load some big framework if all I need is a line or two of code applying touchend in the right way.

Like many sites, my site has many click events like this:

$("button.submitBtn").on('click', function (e) {   
  $.ajaxSubmit({... //ajax form submisssion
});

$("a.ajax").on('click', function (e) {   
  $.ajax({... //ajax page loading
});

$("button.modal").on('click', function (e) {   
      //show/hide modal dialog
});

and what I'd like to do is to get rid of the 300ms delay on ALL those click events using a single code snippet like this:

$("a, button").on('tap', function (e) {
 $(this).trigger('click');
 e.preventDefault();
});

Is that a bad/good idea?

Answer 1

Now some mobile browsers eliminate 300 ms click delay if you set the viewport. You don't need to use workarounds anymore.

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, user-scalable=no">

This is currently supported Chrome for Android, Firefox for Android and Safari for iOS

However on iOS Safari, double-tap is a scroll gesture on unzoomable pages. For that reason they can't remove the 300ms delay. If they can't remove the delay on unzoomable pages, they're unlikely to remove it on zoomable pages.

Windows Phones also retain the 300ms delay on unzoomable pages, but they don't have an alternative gesture like iOS so it's possible for them to remove this delay as Chrome has. You can remove the delay on Windows Phone using:

html {
-ms-touch-action: manipulation;
touch-action: manipulation;
}

Source: http://updates.html5rocks.com/2013/12/300ms-tap-delay-gone-away

UPDATE 2015 December

Until now, WebKit and Safari on iOS had a 350ms delay before single taps activate links or buttons to allow people to zoom into pages with a double tap. Chrome changed this a couple of months ago already by using a smarter algorithm to detect that and WebKit will follow with a similar approach. The article gives some great insights how browsers work with touch gestures and how browsers can still get so much smarter than they are today.

UPDATE 2016 March

On Safari for iOS, the 350 ms wait time to detect a second tap has been removed to create a “fast-tap” response. This is enabled for pages that declare a viewport with either width=device-width or user-scalable=no. Authors can also opt in to fast-tap behavior on specific elements by using the CSS touch-action: manipulation as documented here (scroll down to the 'Styling Fast-Tap Behavior' heading) and here.