In the past, when detecting whether a device supports touch events in JavaScript, we could do something like this:

var touch_capable = ('ontouchstart' in document.documentElement);

However, Google Chrome (17.x.x+) returns true for the above check, even if the underlying device does not support touch events. For example, running the above code on Windows 7 returns true, and thus if we combine it with something like:

var start_evt = (touch_capable) ? 'ontouchstart' : 'onmousedown';

On Google Chrome, the event is never fired since we're binding to ontouchstart. In short, does anyone know a reliable way to circumvent this? I am currently running the following check:

var touch_capable = ('ontouchstart' in document.documentElement && navigator.userAgent.toLowerCase().indexOf('chrome') == -1)

Which is far from ideal...