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FastClick Drupal module removes 300ms tap delay

1 Min. ReadDevelopment

Howdy perfers! This week is just a quick note to let you know about a new release for the FastClick Drupal module which provides integration for the FastClick JS library by FTLabs. Drop it on your sites and feel the difference on touch phones!

300ms tap delay makes for slower browsing

Have you ever noticed a delay between when you tap a link or other UI element and when it finally reacts? This is a solution to remove that delay! It is natively removed in newer versions of Chrome on Android, but for all browsers in iOS this library provides a very noticeable improvement. You might have noticed that tapping around our own site feels faster than it used to. We’re already running this module in production.

You can read about the history, watch a video that demonstrates the effect, and read the rationale for iOS’s continued use of 300ms delay in this HTML5 Rocks article.

Drupal module provides integration

The Drupal module is slim, but it makes for easy integration by downloading a copy of the library to sites/all/libraries/fastclick and adding the script into the footer area instead of up top in the <head>. The maintainer, Pere Orga, is very responsive to issues and open to discussion for improvements.

Code can be found at https://drupal.org/project/fastclick