Users of the Chrome Beta app for Android will no longer suffer from the 300ms delay found in most mobile browsers.
As explained by Google developer Jake Archibald, a delay is added to mobile browsers to detect if a double-tap will be performed. The 300ms delay may be generous if you’re a slow double-tapper, but has probably made your favourite sites feel more like treacle on a cold winter morning.
Though Chrome and Firefox for Android have both disabled the 300ms delay for sites that explicitly tag their pages as non-scalable – i.e., double-tapping won’t zoom in on the page – Chrome developers have gone an extra step and disabled double-tap zooming for pages that set their viewport width to the width of your device. For such pages, attempting to zoom may only increase text size by a few percentage points.
But with double-tap zooming disabled, a greater number of sites can now reclaim the 300 milliseconds of responsiveness whilst still letting users pinch to zoom to get a closer view. Since most mobile browsers have yet to disable the 300ms delay for unscalable or device-width pages, the recommended workaround has been JavaScript-based solutions like FT Labs’ FastClick.
You can check out just how big of an effect 300ms has on responsiveness in the video below:
- Source: Chrome Developers G+