How to detect idle time in JavaScript elegantly?

Question

Is it possible to detect \"idle\" time in JavaScript?
My primary use case probably would be to pre-fetch or preload content.

Idle time:

Answer 1

All the previous answers have an always-active mousemove handler. If the handler is jQuery, the additional processing jQuery performs can add up. Especially if the user is using a gaming mouse, as many as 500 events per second can occur.

This solution avoids handling every mousemove event. This result in a small timing error, but which you can adjust to your need.

function setIdleTimeout(millis, onIdle, onUnidle) {
    var timeout = 0;
    startTimer();

    function startTimer() {
        timeout = setTimeout(onExpires, millis);
        document.addEventListener("mousemove", onActivity);
        document.addEventListener("keydown", onActivity);
    }

    function onExpires() {
        timeout = 0;
        onIdle();
    }

    function onActivity() {
        if (timeout) clearTimeout(timeout);
        else onUnidle();
        //since the mouse is moving, we turn off our event hooks for 1 second
        document.removeEventListener("mousemove", onActivity);
        document.removeEventListener("keydown", onActivity);
        setTimeout(startTimer, 1000);
    }
}

http://jsfiddle.net/jndxq51o/