In #8 we're discussing doing implicit capture for touch. At the hackathon we discussed the "crazy" idea of doing implicit capture for all pointer types and agreed it would almost certainly be too breaking to change long-standing mouse event behavior (and any other option we could think of would be fraught with problems).

But I'm still wondering if there might still be some long-term path here (i.e. not something I'd want to couple to shipping pointer events in Chrome in the first place, but a possible transition later).

To help provide some data on this question @scottgonzalez wrote this Chrome extension. You can try it out by using the "download zip" option in GitHub, unzip to a folder, then "load unpacked extension" in chrome://extensions. After a few minutes of playing on major sites I haven't yet found an issue. I'm sure there's tons of breakage out there, but still maybe it's not as intractable as we thought?

Note that Chrome doesn't yet alter hit-testing during capture for mouse - only for touch. So this isn't a complete test.

One thing that would break for sure is :hover styles during dragging, but maybe some rationalization will come out of #123 that would help.

Long term, if we imagine a world where >80% of web usage is via a phone (we're already at >50% by many measures) then maybe eventually changing the long-standing model of mouse isn't entirely insane?