Streams: does drag and drop still work in Chrome on mobile android devices?

saqimtiaz · April 10, 2022, 12:01pm

Edit: I have verified that this is a change in mobile Chrome’s handling of different data types when dragging. As usual, there is no documentation as to why the change was made or whether it was intentional.

I have just realized that drag and drop in Streams no longer works for me on Chrome 100.0.4896.79 on Android. Since I don’t regularly use Streams - especially not on mobile - I am unsure when this might have stopped working. I can confirm that drag and drop in the same version of Streams works on an older Android phone that has Chrome 99.0.4844.88.

If you use Streams on Android devices I would appreciate some feedback:

Does drag and drop still work for you?
What is your Chrome version number?
If it does not work, when was the most recent time that you can recall that it did work?

Thank you.

Chrome 99:
streams-chrome99

Chrome 100:
streams-chrom100

Watt · April 10, 2022, 12:48pm

Latest Chrome on Android 10
Dragging: not working
Context: working

Firefox on Android
Dragging: not working
Context: working

Duck Duck Go on Android
Dragging: working
Context: not working

On my phone, with my thumbs, that bullet point is very difficult to hit to select context anyway. The dragging fail could be down to technique too. Maybe others can succeed but even where it is working on Duck Go it’s a fiddle. Can I suggest ‘press to select, long press to call up context’?

Apart from that negative quibble, streams is really fantastic - thanks Saq.

saqimtiaz · April 10, 2022, 1:05pm

Thank you for the feedback, much appreciated.

That is because it isn’t an intentional feature on mobile. Until Chrome 99 the context menu was never triggered successfully. That was why we ended up with a swipe gesture to trigger the context menu and the bullet point was never designed for long press on mobile. It seems the triggering of the context menu is related to drag no longer working.

The drag handle is actually much larger than the bullet point as it was optimized for mobile interaction, except for some reason the context menu is now also triggered and the drag aborts.

The draggable area:

As a developer, it isn’t particularly enjoyable when browser changes break existing behaviour with no warning.

Edit: some clarification. If you see the background of a node turning grey on trying to drag, that isn’t the node being selected. That is what happens when a drag is started. However, the drag never proceeds nor ends properly so the grey colour persists.

pmario · April 10, 2022, 2:17pm

I’m using FF 99.1.1 on Android 12 … It doesn’t do drag & drop actions.

Instead it shows the “right click” popup menue. … But I didn’t try streams with my mobile yet. So I can’t say, if it ever did d&d.

saqimtiaz · April 10, 2022, 2:36pm

I don’t think drag and drop in TW has ever worked on mobile Firefox that I know of, but in Chrome on Android it used to be pretty solid.

saqimtiaz · April 10, 2022, 4:48pm

I have verified that this is a change in mobile Chrome’s handling of different data types when dragging. As usual, there is no documentation as to why the change was made or whether it was intentional.

github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5

[BUG] Drag and drop does not work in mobile Chrome

opened 04:41PM - 10 Apr 22 UTC

saqimtiaz

Drag and drop in mobile Chrome does not work in Chrome 100.0.4896.79 on Android.… However, it did work at least as recently as Chrome 99.0.4844.88. The `dragstart` event fires but after that no drag related events are fired (`dragenter`, `dragover`, `dragleave`, `dragend`). I have verified that this is due to the fact that we set a data URI as the value of the `URL` data transfer format in our `dragstart` event handler: https://github.com/Jermolene/TiddlyWiki5/blob/73138b79aaaafa32b3a0abf8ba80c96eb3a18d56/core/modules/utils/dom/dragndrop.js#L105 Commenting out this line or removing the `data:` prefix from the value assigned restores functionality. There is a [similar bug](https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=1293803) filed for Chrome on Android two months ago which describes any MIME type other than `text/plain` causing the exact same problem with drag and drop. Before we report this as a new or related bug, we should confirm that the specifications for the `URL` data transfer format/MIME type do not prohibit the `data:` prefix. In particular see items 6 and 9 in the specs for `getData` at https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/dnd.html#dom-datatransfer-getdata and [RFC2483](https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2483) for parsing `text/uri-list` data.

hubertgk · April 14, 2022, 10:45am

Sorry for reporting late, here are my “tests”:

Chrome for Android 100.0.4896.88
drag and drop not working

DuckDuckGo browser 5.120.0 (not sure about the Chromium version)
drag and drop stopped working recently

Freedom Browser (Chromium-based) on Android 95.0.4638.50
drag and drop still working (but it’s a matter of time)

Firefox (Android) 99.2.0
drag and drop not working / has never worked

I’ve seen Stack Overflow posts about mobile FF’s implementation of HTML5 drag and drop which was problematic (I can’t find them anymore) and was wondering if there was a way to get around that by changing things in the TW core that would finally enable drag and drop in Firefox (Android)?

I know we have the Mobile Drag and Drop Shim Plugin, which enables d&d on FF and probably on Chrome as well but it’s been hit and miss for me – dragging and dropping on FF works with it but on drag the entire page is also scrolled, so… UX is not great at all.

Referring to Saq’s github issue, is this new Chrome “bug” or braking change in any way related to the way things have been working in Firefox? If it is, could this perhaps be addressed as well or would a separate issue be needed? Or maybe that’s something we have no control over at all because it’s up to Mozilla to fix?

Thanks,
Hubert