menu behaviour - mouse hover vs touch taps

Copper Contributor

In an enterprise application that we have (Infor), it has menus that are more designed with mouse pointer hover instead of touch.  When using touch to access the menu that designed to expand further into sub-menus (entries with  arrow symbols beside them), the entire menu disappears.  When you touch it again, the sub-menu will show up in its place. 

 

So far this behaviour occurs on all current touch-based devices that I have used, with various different browsers (iOS 12 with Safari, Windows 10 touchscreen laptop with Chrome, Edge classic, and Edge Chromium Beta, as well as Android tablets with Chrome browser).

 

However, when I tested an iPad running iPadOS 13 beta (public beta 7), this behaviour has been changed for the better.  Instead of collapsing the entire menu when a sub-menu is tapped, Safari in iOS 13 beta will make menu appears on the side, which is similar to the user experience when using mouse.  This alone makes using this enterprise application that we have much more user friendly on touchscreen devices, which could greatly improve the usability of our field workers. 

 

I would like to know if the team here can make an enhancement request to future releases of Edge to change the behaviour of hover menu to act similar to iPadOS 13.  (Maybe you can upstream that change to Chromium itself so that all Chromium-based browsers can benefit.)

 

I have included two screen captures:  first one the the behaviour of Windows with Chrome/Edge (both Classic and Chromium), iOS 12 Safari and Android tablets with Chrome, while the second one is the behaviour of iPadOS 13 Safari.

 

hover menu - iOS 12 and Windows 10 Edge classic/Edge Chromium/Chrome behaviourhover menu - iOS 12 and Windows 10 Edge classic/Edge Chromium/Chrome behaviour

hover menu - iPadOS 13 Safari behaviourhover menu - iPadOS 13 Safari behaviour

1 Reply

Hi @4tran, I am not sure what we can do here, but we are investing in accessibility and touch improvements in the Chromium tree.  I will forward this thread on to the owner of these areas and see what they say.  Thanks - Elliot