Well that's a bummer. The UI in the Chrome app is really slick!
The real stumbling block, IMO, is that without jailbreaking, links from other apps will always open in Safari.
They have a generic mechanism to send files to other apps, but not for URLs, making it painful to pass a URL to Twitter or an instant messaging app.
I'm looking for a generic mechanism to let the user choose an app and pass an 'http' url to that app. I don't think I can do that with custom schemes, because each app would have its own scheme.
It could be accomplished via a custom file type if everybody standardized on it (say via a .url file of type text/x-url or maybe even text/plain). But I was hoping for something official.
The current way people do this is via the pasteboard, but the switching and pasting process feels awkward to me. I suppose that may be the best solution for now. Maybe apps should just handle things better if they're awoken with a new URL on the pasteboard (i.e. offer to take an action with it).
I'll think through my use cases some more.
> Maybe apps should just handle things better if they're awoken with a new URL on the pasteboard (i.e. offer to take an action with it).
This is almost how using custom URL schemes would work, but I think it's still superior to fiddling with the pasteboard though.
But you are right. There isn't a standard way to do it now. Most apps that expose or utilize this form integration has to come up with something themselves. Also see http://handleopenurl.com/
Safari on iOS 6 (on iPad, at least) finally lets you open more than 9 tabs! The new max is 25, which is enough.