Web Intents
Web Intents was an experimental framework for web-based inter-application communication and service discovery.
Web Intents consists of a discovery mechanism and a very light-weight RPC system between web applications, modelled after the Intents system in Android.
In the context of the framework an Intent equals an action to be performed by a provider.
Web Intents allow two web applications to communicate with each other, without either of them having to actually know what the other one is.
Support
Client
- Google Chrome versions 18 to 23 natively supported Web Intents. This support was disabled in version 24, citing the existence of a "number of areas for development in both the API and specific user experience in Chrome".
- There is a JavaScript shim with support for IE 8, IE 9, Opera, Safari, Firefox 3+ and Chrome 3+.
Server
- There are some Web Intents proxy pages that make available some real services that don't yet support intents.
- AddThis supports Web Intents by their sharing tools regardless of browser support.
History
Paul Kinlan of Google announced the Web Intents project in December 2010. He soon released a prototype API to GitHub. In August 2011 Google announced that Chrome would support Web Intents. Google and Mozilla have started co-operating to unify Web Intents and Mozilla's Web Activities into one proposal.In November 2012, Greg Billock of Google announced that experimental support of Web Intents had been removed from Chrome.