At Splitted-Desktop, we build Internet Terminals and lately we added a touchscreen option to them. So I started to play with them and I found that it's very difficult to use a web browser with pages not designed for touchscreens (big buttons/areas).

So my idea is to extend the active area to ease the clicking on touchscreen. I started to look around for solutions but I'm not familiar with web browser internals. So I discussed with some Mozilla folks and they come up with the idea to implement something in javascript.

I did some experiments under Firefox with a Greasemonkey script that you can find at userscripts.org. It somehow works but it has some limitations:

  • web pages making active elements of non active elements (like LI, EM) like gmail, google calendar don't work. I tried to find if there is way to detect event handlers registered on these elements without success.
  • when you click on the browser window to give focus back to the browser it follows the nearest link and I would like to avoid that but it's less important than the previous point. Anyway this information doesn't seem to be exposed to javascript...

If you have any idea to solve or workaround these limitations, let me know.