What's the best way to detect a 'touch screen' device using JavaScript?

Question

I\'ve written a jQuery plug-in that\'s for use on both desktop and mobile devices. I wondered if there is a way with JavaScript to detect if the device has touch screen capa

Answer 1

I also struggled a lot with different options on how to detect in Javascript whether the page is displayed on a touch screen device or not. IMO, as of now, no real option exists to detect the option properly. Browsers either report touch events on desktop machines (because the OS maybe touch-ready), or some solutions don't work on all mobile devices.

In the end, I realized that I was following the wrong approach from the start: If my page was to look similar on touch and non-touch devices, I maybe shouldn't have to worry about detecting the property at all: My scenario was to deactivate tooltips over buttons on touch devices as they lead to double-taps where I wanted a single tap to activate the button.

My solution was to refactor the view so that no tooltip was needed over a button, and in the end I didn't need to detect the touch device from Javascript with methods that all have their drawbacks.