ReadWriteWeb

The developers of two of the most influential open-source Web browsers are working together on a feature that should make Web apps play together much more nicely. As we covered on ReadWriteHack yesterday, Google's Chromium engineers announced that they're working with Mozilla on a framework called Web Intents, the brainchild of Google developer Paul Kinlan. Firefox announced its project last month.

Web Intents, based on an existing capability in Google's Android mobile OS, will let Web apps express a simple call for an action, like 'share' or 'edit,' which receiving apps will be designed to use, without either app needing to have specific knowledge of the APIs of the other. This way, instead of having to code for each specific Web app one might want to access, developers can just use these simple requests, which will be built into the browser. The Chrome and Firefox teams are each building this functionality for their own browser, but they're combining their proposals to use a single API for Web app developers to reach both platforms.

Google expanded international support for its Chrome Web Store today and will now allow merchants to target or exclude individual international markets. Developers within those markets can sign up for merchant accounts and localize their app listings, but paid apps won't be visible in those markets until later this year. The changes are the latest of several that are designed to monetize the development of Web apps via Google's Chrome browser.

In July, Google launched their API for in-app payments in apps delivered through the Chrome Web Store. The transaction incurs a flat 5% fee.

Today, mobile application development vendor appMobi launched a new 1-Click payment technology called cloudKey which secures users' credit card information for online purchases on their device, not on remote servers. With the wave of recent high-profile hacking attacks on companies like Sony, Citi and AT&T, even non-security minded folks have become aware of the need for improvements to the current system.

Until now, credit card accounts and personal information have been stored in centralized, online databases, making them vulnerable to attacks. With the new cloudKey system, which uses standard encryption technology and a "distributed key" topology, appMobi aims to deliver a more secure solution.

I've had a chance to test-drive a Chromebook already, but having received my very own this week (See disclosure at the end of this post), I decided to see if, indeed, I could make the Web-only netbook work for me. I mean really work for me. Many of the early reviews of the Chromebook suggested that, while it was a great idea and a decent netbook, the Web itself wasn't quite ready for users to have to rely solely on Web apps.

So I decided to put away my laptop (a MacBook Pro, for those keeping score at home) and try to go a full day without any native apps. I ran my new Chromebook through the paces, and although it's a Friday, true - a day when a lot less tech news and tech blogging tends to happen - I was still able to perform my job, with little more struggling than if I'd moved to any new computer (or upgraded to a brand new operating system).

You're probably familiar with the practice of developing countries seeking to leapfrog over the world's leading economies in their own development. They aim to capture (or surpass) the growth and comforts of the previously-developed world while avoiding mistakes and externalities like polution and inefficiency. What if the future of the web unfolded that way, too?

That's where Brazilian mobile services company Movile finds itself: with a thriving business of mobile users throughout Latin America, who are heavily engaged in purchasing SMS services and virtual goods, but with the knowledge that there's far more to be done than sell those existing products. Movile has a corporate vision of leapfrogging over the App Store 1.0 experience so dominated by Apple among smart phone owners in the United States. How does the company aim to build the app store of the future? By combining cross-platform mobile HTML5 with ecommerce and now social APIs.

Can Facebook unseat Apple at its own game, within its own ecosystem? There are reports that the social giant is working on an HTML5 version of its platform that would become a distribution mechanism for Web applications through Apple's mobile Safari browser.

In many ways, this is what people have been predicting for a while -- HTML5 will kill the native mobile application. There are few better companies than Facebook to take up the mantle of HTML5 to foster an environment of Web applications. Facebook has the user and developer base, the social reach and deep pockets to make a big splash in the mobile ecosystem.

In a study of 500 of some of the top sites on the Internet, mobile performance consultants Blaze found less than half of the top destinations in the United States were optimized for smartphones.

Of the Alexa 500 top sites in the U.S., 40% were optimized for smartphones (42% iOS, 38% Android). Yet when it comes to Android, those 200 sites overwhelmingly returned the same page to both a smartphone and a tablet, meaning that developers have not rendered Android specific versions of their sites for Android tablets. See the infographic after the jump.

TweetDeck's Web application, which made its Chrome Web Store debut back in December, has generally proved to be a worthy alternative to the TweetDeck AIR application for the desktop. However, up until today, the Web app only worked with Google's Chrome Web browser.  Now, says the company, TweetDeck is coming to all the major browsers, including Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer and Opera.

Apple iOS devices run Web applications two-and-a-half times more slowly when they're launched from the home screen than when they're run from within the mobile Safari browser. According to numerous tests by the technology blog The Register, when Web apps are saved to the home screen and launched this way, they aren't able to take advantage of Safari's recently updated Nitro JavaScript engine nor do they get to utilize some Web caching systems.

The poor performance of these Web apps could simply be a bug introduced in the most recent iOS. Or it could be an intentional move by Apple to make it more difficult for those who'd like to bypass its App Store and offer Web rather than native apps.

This week, GetJar teamed up with Zynga to announce the debut of new mobile games: Mafia Wars and Zynga Poker. Mafia Wars, already a familiar name to Facebook users, is a GetJar exclusive, meaning it's being launched first on the GetJar.com website prior to any other app store. Zynga Poker is an Android-only offering.

The announcement of new games, however, is only mildly interesting. What's really notable about this news, at least in our opinion, is that Mafia Wars is an HTML5-powered, browser-based game. And its exclusive launch on GetJar points towards the possibility that this third-party app store could soon serve as a worthy launchpad for many more HTML5 mobile Web applications in the near future.