If you happen to have a Windows 8 touch device, you might have noticed that not all web browsers are working as well as you’d hoped. The problem has to do with the touch sensitivity itself – unless you stick with using Internet Explorer with its Pointer Events specifications that make it friendly towards your fingers, you’re likely to find your browser being somewhat unresponsive, which can be seriously annoying for those who prefer Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.

Even worse, it’s been quite a while already. Windows 8 machines burst onto the scene seven months ago, and still browsers like Chrome are not optimized for touch. However, that could soon change thanks to a somewhat unusual collaboration between Google, Microsoft and other partners.

The World Wide Web Consortium, the body that keeps the WWW in check, recently promoted Pointer Events specifications to “Candidate Recommendation” status, “an important step towards a standard and interoperable way to handle input from touch, pen, mouse, and more.” The decision marks the “the effective collaboration between Microsoft, Google, Mozilla, Opera, Nokia, jQuery, and others to help sites take advantage of new interactive hardware on the Web.”

The W3C knows that users are now browsing the web from various devices, and Pointer Events makes sure that sites are responsive to any type of input, including the all-important touch, to deliver the best experience to users.

With this status upgrade, Microsoft Open Technologies Inc. has submitted a formal Intent to Implement that would enable its engineering team to “actively collaborate and work toward a positive adoption of Pointer Events by the Blink developer community.   Blink, of course, is the open-source browser engine project that powers Google’s Chrome browser.

MS Open Tech posted the following message on its blog:

“Pointer Events makes it easier to support many browsers and devices by saving Web developers from writing unique code for each input type. Today people interact with Web content on a range of devices – phones, tablets, PCs, even the living room TV. Pointer Events unifies how you code for point, click and touch across these devices. The input model is based on the APIs already available in IE10 on Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 and you can start building websites incorporating point, click, and touch,”

The submission of intent doesn’t guarantee that Pointer Events specifications will be incorporated into Chrome, but the response suggests that they’re heading in that direction.