WebKit is changing tap timing, from More Responsive Tapping on iOS:
We know that responsive tapping is really important to web developers — so much so that many are willing to employ JavaScript frameworks to avoid the delay using touch handlers. Instead of waiting for WebKit to fire a click after a delay, these libraries prevent the default behavior of the touchend event and call click() immediately so that the element is clicked the moment the user stops touching the element. While this may make a link feel fast, it can also reduce responsiveness in other ways, including page load time and scrolling. To address this, we baked fast tapping optimizations into WebKit so well-scaled mobile web pages will be able to achieve responsive tapping out of the box without the drawbacks of third-party frameworks.
I’m looking forward to removing one more piece of JavaScript that only existed to work around suboptimal browser behavior.
Unfortunately there is still a fair bit of waiting involved. First, the next version of mobile Safari, which means iOS 10. Based on previous schedules that should happen during 2016. Then we need come up with work arounds for the still fairly large number of iPhones that won’t be able to upgrade to iOS 10.
Add ‘de-couple mobile Safari from iOS releases’ to my iOS 10 wish list.