How to prevent sticky hover effects for buttons on touch devices

Question

I have created a carousel with a previous and a next button that are always visible  These buttons have a hover state  they turn blue  On touch devices  like iPad  the hover state is sticky  so the button stays blue after tapping it  I don t want that    I could add a no-hover class ontouchend for each button  and make my CSS like this  button not  no-hover  hover   background-color  blue    but that s probably quite bad for performance  and doesn t handle devices like the Chromebook Pixel  which has both a touchscreen and a mouse  correctly  I could add a touch class to the documentElement and make my CSS like this  html not  touch  button hover   background-color  blue    But that also doesn t work right on devices with both touch and a mouse    What I would prefer is removing the hover state ontouchend  But it doesn t seem like that is possible  Focusing another element doesn t remove the hover state  Tapping another element manually does  but I can t seem to trigger that in JavaScript   All the solutions I have found seem imperfect  Is there a perfect solution

User · Answer

This is a common problem with no perfect solution. Hover behavior is useful with a mouse and mostly detrimental with touch. Compounding the problem are devices which support touch and mouse (simultaneously, no less!) like the Chromebook Pixel and Surface.

The cleanest solution I've found is to only enable hover behavior if the device isn't deemed to support touch input.

var isTouch =  !!("ontouchstart" in window) || window.navigator.msMaxTouchPoints > 0;

if( !isTouch ){
    // add class which defines hover behavior
}

Granted, you lose hover on devices which may support it. However, sometimes hover impacts more than the link itself, e.g. perhaps you want to show a menu when an element is hovered. This approach allows you to test for the existence of touch and perhaps conditionally attach a different event.

I've tested this on the iPhone, iPad, Chromebook Pixel, Surface, and a variety of Android devices. I can't guarantee that it will work when a generic USB touch input (such as a stylus) is added to the mix.

User · Answer

The solution for me was after touchend was to clone and replace the node    i hate doing this but even trying to repaint the element with offsetHeight wasn t working      let cloneNode   originNode cloneNode  true        originNode parentNode replaceChild  cloneNode  originNode

User · Answer

With Modernizr you can target your hovers specifically for no-touch devices    Note  this doesn t run on StackOverflow s snippet system  check the jsfiddle instead      this one is sticky     regular hover   regular active     opacity  0 5        this one isn t    html no-touch  no-touch hover   no-touch active     opacity  0 5      Note that  active doesn t need to be targeted with  no-touch because it works as expected on both mobile and desktop

User · Answer

It was helpful for me  link  function hoverTouchUnstick            Check if the device supports touch events     if  ontouchstart  in document documentElement               Loop through each stylesheet         for var sheetI   document styleSheets length - 1  sheetI  gt   0  sheetI--                var sheet   document styleSheets sheetI                  Verify if cssRules exists in sheet             if sheet cssRules                       Loop through each rule in sheet                 for var ruleI   sheet cssRules length - 1  ruleI  gt   0  ruleI--                        var rule   sheet cssRules ruleI                          Verify rule has selector text                     if rule selectorText                               Replace hover psuedo-class with active psuedo-class                         rule selectorText   rule selectorText replace   hover     active

User · Answer

Thats too easy to use javascrpt  thats not hover problem thats focus problem  set outline to none when focus using css   button focus   outline  none

User · Answer

It can be accomplished by swapping an HTML class  It should be less prone to glitches than removing the whole element  especially with large  image links etc   We can also decide whether we want hover states to be triggered when scrolling with touch  touchmove  or even add a timeout to delay them   The only significant change in our code will be using additional HTML class such as  lt a class  hover  gt  lt  a gt  on elements that implement the new behaviour   HTML   lt a class  my-link hover  href     gt      Test  lt  a gt    CSS   my-link active      active can be turned off to disable hover state on  touchmove   my-link hover hover        border  2px dotted grey      JS  with jQuery       hover   bind  touchstart   function          var  el      el     this       el removeClass  hover          el hover null  function             el addClass  hover                 Example  https   codepen io mattrcouk pen VweajZv  -  I don   t have any device with both mouse and touch to test it properly  though

User · Answer

I have nice solution that i would like to share  First you need to detect if user is on mobile like this   var touchDevice    ipad iphone android windows phone blackberry i test navigator userAgent toLowerCase       Then just add   if   touchDevice            navbar-ul   addClass  hoverable        And in CSS    navbar-ul hoverable li a hover       color   fff

User · Answer

elementwithhover   click function           code that makes element or parent slide or otherwise move out from under mouse        this  clone true  insertAfter   this        this  remove

User · Answer

Some of the sticky or stuck  hover  focus  active problems on mobile devices may be caused by missing  lt meta name  viewport  content  width device-width  gt  as the browsers try to manipulate the screen

User · Answer

This works perfectly in 2 steps    Set your body tag to be like this  lt body ontouchstart    gt   I m not a fan of this  hack   but it allows Safari on iOS to react to touches instantly  Not sure how  but it works  Set up your touchable class like this      I did this in SASS  but this should work with normal CSS as well     Touchable class  example           Default styles     background  green          Default hover styles          Think of this as Desktop and larger       amp  hover           background  yellow                Default active styles      amp  active           background  red                Setup breakpoint for smaller device widths      media only screen and  max-width  1048px                Important             Reset touchable hover styles            You may want to use the same exact styles as the Default styles          amp  hover               background  green                        Important             Touchable active styles          amp  active               background  red                       You may want to remove any animation on your touchable class as well  Android Chrome seems to be a little slower than iOS   This will also result in the active state being applied if the user scrolls the page while touching your class

User · Answer

I went through the similar problem  my application was compatible for all screen sizes had a hell lot of hover effects in the desktop-screen-size   mouse based devices   and later on I realised that touch based devices were causing a condition known as sticky-hover and it was an hurdle for the app to work properly for touch based device users   We were making use of SCSS in our app  and I defined a mixin to take care of touch based device    mixin hover-support      media not all and  pointer  coarse         amp  hover          content                and then I placed all my css classes under the below-mentioned snippet       include hover-support            Your css-classes or css that you want to apply on those devices that support hover         For instance we had a class for animating an icon  and which used to trigger once we hover over icon as you can see it from css  but in touch based device it was getting affected by sticky hover-effect and then I placed it inside  include hover-support   in order to ensure that hover only applies to those devices that support hover    include hover-support        animate-icon       -webkit-transition  all 0 2s      transition  all 0 2s       amp  hover         transform  scale 1 3         filter  brightness 85          cursor  pointer

User · Answer

Here s some simple JavaScript code that doesn t require the developer to edit CSS or write any new CSS rules  I wrote this for Bootstrap buttons with class  btn   but it will work with any button that has a specific class name   The steps are    determine if this is a touch device if it is  iterate over every CSS rule in document styleSheets delete any rule containing both  btn and  hover   The elimination of all  btn  hover CSS rules ensures that there will be no visual hover effect on a button   Step 1  Detect Touch Device  Check media query for presence of  hover  none        const hasMatchMedia   typeof window matchMedia      undefined                  determine if device is touch-capable        true - device is touch-capable        false - device is not touch-capable        null - unable to determine touch capability         return  null boolean              const hasTouch        gt          if  hasMatchMedia            return window matchMedia   hover  none    matches                return null           Step 2  Delete CSS Rules Containing  btn  and   hover                  remove all CSS rules contaning both   btn  and   hover          return  number  count of rules deleted             function removeBtnHovers             let rulesDeleted   0            recursively delete   btn hover  rules       function recursiveDelete  rules  styleSheet             if  typeof rules      undefined               typeof rules length      undefined               rules length  lt   0              return                        iterate in reverse order             deleting any rule containing both   btn  and   hover          const ruleLen   rules length          for  let i   ruleLen - 1  i  gt   0  i--              const rule   rules i             if  typeof rule cssRules      undefined                    a standard rule  evaluate it             const cssText   rule cssText              if  typeof cssText      string   amp  amp                cssText includes   btn    amp  amp                cssText includes   hover                    styleSheet deleteRule i                 rulesDeleted                              else                  rule contains cssRules  iterate over them             recursiveDelete rule cssRules  rule                                           iterate over all style sheets in document       for  const styleSheet of document styleSheets            let rules   styleSheet cssRules          if   rules    continue            recursiveDelete rules  styleSheet                 return rulesDeleted          Complete code is on GitHub and npm   Live demo at terrymorse com

User · Answer

You can override the hover effect for devices that don t support hover  Like    my-thing       color   BADA55      my-thing hover       color  hotpink      media  hover  none         my-thing           color   BADA55            Tested and verified on iOS 12  Hat tip to https   stackoverflow com a 50285058 178959 for pointing this out

User · Answer

From 2020 You can add hover styles inside media query  media  hover  hover  and  pointer  fine           css hover class style       This media query indicates that styles will work on browsers that not emulate  hover so it will NOT work on touch browsers

User · Answer

I was going to post my own solution  but checking if someone already posted it  I found that  Rodney almost did it  However  he missed it one last crucial that made it uniseful  at least in my case  I mean  I too took the same  fakeHover class addition   removing via mouseenter and mouseleave event detection  but that alone  per se  acts almost exactly like  genuine   hover  I mean  when you tap on a element in your table  it won t detect that you have  leaved  it - thus keeping the  fakehover  state   What I did was simply to listen on click  too  so when I  tap  the button  I manually fire a mouseleave   Si this is my final code    fakeHover       background-color  blue          document  on  mouseenter    button myButton  function          this  addClass  fakeHover           document  on  mouseleave    button myButton  function          this  removeClass  fakeHover           document  on  button myButton   click   function          this  mouseleave          This way you keep your usual hover functionality when using a mouse when simply  hovering  on your buttons  Well  almost all of it  the only drawback somehow is that  after clicking on the button with the mouse  it wont be in hover state  Much like if you clicked and quickly took the pointer out of the button  But in my case I can live with that

User · Answer

I think I ve found an elegant  minimum js  solution for a similar problem   Using jQuery  you can trigger hover on body  or any other element   using  mouseover    So I simply attach a this handler to the element s ontouchend event like so    x000D   x000D  var unhover   function     x000D       body   mousover      x000D     x000D   hoverable   x000D    width  100px  x000D    height  100px  x000D    background  teal  x000D    cursor  pointer  x000D    x000D   x000D   hoverable hover   x000D    background  pink  x000D    x000D   lt div class  hoverable  ontouchend  unhover  gt  lt  div gt  x000D   x000D   x000D    This  however  only removes  hover pseudoclass from the element after some other touch event has been triggered  like swipe or another touch

User · Answer

You can remove the hover state by temporarily removing the link from the DOM  See http   testbug handcraft com ipad html    In the CSS you have    hover  background red     In the JS you have   function fix         var el   this      var par   el parentNode      var next   el nextSibling      par removeChild el       setTimeout function    par insertBefore el  next     0      And then in your HTML you have    lt a href     ontouchend  this onclick fix  gt test lt  a gt

User · Answer

What I did so far in my projects was was to revert the  hover changes on touch devices    myhoveredclass       background-color green     myhoveredclass hover       background-color red     media screen and  -webkit-min-device-pixel-ratio 0         myhoveredclass hover   myhoveredclass active   myhoveredclass focus           background-color green            All class names and named colors just for demonstration purposes  -

User · Answer

This worked for me  put the hover styling in a new class   fakehover  background  red    Then add   remove the class as and when required      someclass  gt  li   on  mouseenter   function e        this  addClass  fakehover            someclass  gt  li   on  mouseleave   function e        this  removeClass  fakehover          Repeat for touchstart and touchend events  Or whatever events you like to get the desired result  for example I wanted the hover effect to be toggled on a touch screen

User · Answer

You could set background-color on  active state and give  focus  the defaut background   if you set background-color via onfocus ontouch  color style remains once  focus state has gone  You need a reset on onblur as well to restore defaut bg when focus is lost

User · Answer

You can try this way   javascript    var isEventSupported   function  eventName  elementName        var el   elementName   document createElement elementName    window      eventName    on    eventName      var isSupported    eventName in el       if   isSupported  amp  amp  el setAttribute            el setAttribute eventName   return             isSupported   typeof el eventName      function             el   null      return isSupported      if   isEventSupported  touchstart             a   addClass  with-hover        css   a with-hover hover     color   fafafa

User · Answer

Once CSS Media Queries Level 4 is implemented  you ll be able to do this    media  hover  hover        button hover           background-color  blue            Or in English   If the browser supports proper true real non-emulated hovering  e g  has a mouse-like primary input device   then apply this style when buttons are hovered over    Since this part of Media Queries Level 4 has so far only been implemented in bleeding-edge Chrome  I wrote a polyfill to deal with this  Using it  you can transform the above futuristic CSS into   html my-true-hover button hover       background-color  blue       A variation on the  no-touch technique  And then using some client-side JavaScript from the same polyfill that detects support for hovering  you can toggle the presence of the my-true-hover class accordingly     document  on  mq4hsChange   function  e          document documentElement  toggleClass  my-true-hover   e trueHover

User · Answer

A solution that has worked for me   html      -webkit-tap-highlight-color  rgba 0  0  0  0       Add this code to your stylesheet   I wanted to get rid of the grey background that appears on iOS Safari when a link is clicked  But it appears to do more  Now clicking a button  with a  hover pseudoclass   gets opened right away  I only tested it on an iPad  I don t know if it ll work on other devices

User · Answer

I could add a no-hover class ontouchend for each button  and make my CSS like  this  button not  no-hover  hover   background-color    blue    but that s probably quite bad for performance  and doesn t handle  devices like the Chromebook Pixel  which has both a touchscreen and a mouse   correctly    This is the right starting point  Next step  apply remove nohover class on following events  demo with jQuery   buttonelement   on  touchend touchcancel  function     this  addClass  nohover       on  touchstart mouseover  function    this  removeClass  nohover           Notice  If You wish to apply other classes to the buttonelement  the  not  nohover  in the CSS won t work anymore as expected  Than You have to add instead a separate definition with default value and  important tag to overwrite hover style        nohover  background-color  white  important    This should even handle devices like the Chromebook Pixel  which has both a touchscreen and a mouse  correctly  And I don t think  that this a major performance killer

User · Answer

This is what I have come up with so far after studying the rest of the answers  It should be able to support touch-only  mouse-only or hybrid users   Create a separate hover class for the hover effect  By default  add this hover class to our button   We do not want to detect the presence of touch support and disable all hover effects from the very beginning  As mentioned by others  hybrid devices are gaining popularity  people may have touch support but want to use a mouse and vice versa  Therefore  only remove the hover class when the user actually touches the button   The next problem is  what if the user wants to go back to using a mouse after touching the button  To solve that  we need to find an opportune moment to add back the hover class which we have removed   However  we cannot add it back immediately after removing it  because the hover state is still active  We may not want to destroy and recreate the entire button as well   So  I thought of using a busy-waiting algorithm  using setInterval  to check the hover state  Once the hover state is deactivated  we can then add back the hover class and stop the busy-waiting  bringing us back to the original state where the user can use either mouse or touch   I know busy-waiting isn t that great but I m not sure if there is an appropriate event  I ve considered to add it back in the mouseleave event  but it was not very robust  For example  when an alert pops up after the button is touched  the mouse position shifts but the mouseleave event is not triggered    x000D   x000D  var button   document getElementById  myButton    x000D   x000D  button ontouchstart   function e    x000D    console log  ontouchstart    x000D        button   removeClass  button-hover    x000D    startIntervalToResetHover    x000D     x000D   x000D  button onclick   function e    x000D    console log  onclick    x000D    x000D   x000D  var intervalId  x000D   x000D  function startIntervalToResetHover     x000D       Clear the previous one  if any  x000D    if  intervalId    x000D      clearInterval intervalId   x000D      x000D     x000D    intervalId   setInterval function     x000D         Stop if the hover class already exists  x000D      if      button   hasClass  button-hover      x000D        clearInterval intervalId   x000D        intervalId   null  x000D        return  x000D        x000D       x000D         Checking of hover state from  x000D         http   stackoverflow com a 8981521 2669960  x000D      var isHovered         button   filter function     x000D        return   this  is   hover    x000D         length  x000D       x000D      if  isHovered    x000D        console log  Hover state is active    x000D        else   x000D        console log  Hover state is inactive    x000D            button   addClass  button-hover    x000D        console log  Added back the button-hover class    x000D         x000D        clearInterval intervalId   x000D        intervalId   null  x000D        x000D       1000   x000D    x000D   button   x000D    color  green  x000D    border  none  x000D    x000D   x000D   button-hover hover   x000D    background  yellow  x000D    border  none  x000D    x000D   x000D   button active   x000D    border  none  x000D    x000D   lt script src  https   ajax googleapis com ajax libs jquery 2 1 1 jquery min js  gt  lt  script gt  x000D   lt button id  myButton  class  button button-hover  gt Hello lt  button gt  x000D   x000D   x000D    Edit  Another approach I tried is to call e preventDefault   within ontouchstart or ontouchend  It appears to stop the hover effect when the button is touched  but it also stops the button click animation and prevents the onclick function from being called when the button is touched  so you have to call those manually in the ontouchstart or ontouchend handler  Not a very clean solution

User · Answer

Based on Darren Cooks answer which also works if you moved your finger over another element   See Find element finger is on during a touchend event  jQuery function         FastClick attach document body          Prevent sticky hover effects for buttons on touch devices    From https   stackoverflow com a 17234319          Usage      lt a href       touch-focus-fix gt    lt  a gt        Refactored from a directive for better performance and compability jQuery document documentElement  on  touchend   function event       use strict      function fix sourceElement        var el     sourceElement  closest   touch-focus-fix    0       if   el          return            var par   el parentNode      var next   el nextSibling      par removeChild el       par insertBefore el  next          fix event target     var changedTouch   event originalEvent changedTouches 0        http   www w3 org TR 2011 WD-touch-events-20110505  the-touchend-event   if   changedTouch        return        var touchTarget   document elementFromPoint changedTouch clientX  changedTouch clientY     if  touchTarget  amp  amp  touchTarget     event target        fix touchTarget             Codepen Demo

User · Answer

From 4 ways to deal with sticky hover on mobile  Here s a way to dynamically add or remove a  can touch  class to the document based on the current input type of the user  It works with hybrid devices as well where the user may be switching between touch and a mouse trackpad    lt script gt     function        var isTouch   false   var to indicate current input type  is touch versus no touch       var isTouchTimer      var curRootClass        var indicating current document root class   can-touch  or          function addtouchclass e           clearTimeout isTouchTimer          isTouch   true         if  curRootClass     can-touch      add  can-touch  class if it s not already present             curRootClass    can-touch              document documentElement classList add curRootClass                    isTouchTimer   setTimeout function   isTouch   false   500    maintain  istouch  state for 500ms so removetouchclass doesn t get fired immediately following a touch event            function removetouchclass e           if   isTouch  amp  amp  curRootClass     can-touch      remove  can-touch  class if not triggered by a touch event and class is present             isTouch   false             curRootClass                  document documentElement classList remove  can-touch                        document addEventListener  touchstart   addtouchclass  false    this event only gets called when input type is touch     document addEventListener  mouseover   removetouchclass  false    this event gets called when input type is everything from touch to mouse  trackpad         lt  script gt

User · Answer

Add this JS code to your page   document body className    ontouchstart  in document documentElement         hover     now in your CSS before every hover add the hover class like this    hover  foo hover      If the device is touch  the body class will be empty  otherwise its class will be hover and the rules are applied

[javascript] How to prevent sticky hover effects for buttons on touch devices

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