Google Announces Plans To Bake Android-Like Web Intents Into Chrome

This is an incredibly cool idea that essentially brings back the concept of a decentralized web. Right now, we have somehow embraced a monolithic web culture were interop goes only in one direction - towards Facebook mainly, closely followed by Google's conglomerate.<p>Web Intents will level the playing field again, and they make those horrible embedded Facebook/Google+/whatever social networking buttons obsolete by replacing them with something way more powerful.

Official announcement: <a href="http://blog.chromium.org/2011/08/connecting-web-apps-with-web-intents.html" rel="nofollow">http://blog.chromium.org/2011/08/connecting-web-apps-with-we...</a>

I think custom URL schemes like: mailto:, tel:, sms:, twitter: are kinda like lightweight intents.<p><a href="http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#featuredarticles/iPhoneURLScheme_Reference/Articles/PhoneLinks.html" rel="nofollow">http://developer.apple.com/library/ios/#featuredarticles/iPh...</a>

Aren't we all supposed to scream "non standard!!" like we did when IE added behaviors?

How well have intents actually worked out in practice on Android? It's been awhile since I spent much time with an Android device but a year or so ago it was very rare that I really wanted a generic utility.

I want Google Chrome in Android, not the other way around.

I like the idea, but is anyone else worried about the user interface? I don't like the thought of any site I happen to drive by registering their ability to handle intents. When it does become time for me to edit a photo, I don't want 50 choices popping up, nearly none of which I remember. And, it seems rife with phishing opportunities.<p>I'm not sure what the answer is here. I also don't want to be asked every time a site wants to register an intent. If you just make it opt-in, it seems like most users will simply miss the opportunity to do so.

In my opinion, feature creep is starting to bloat Chrome.