Get ready to gag on RIM’s technical excellence: BlackBerry 10′s web browser has just leapt neatly over a huge hurdle, one of Facebook’s home-brewed tests for mobile browser performance.

Ringmark is a set of tests Facebook developed to challenge mobile browsers on basic standards: Can the browser access the device’s camera, does it have the software to run games or play music, etc.

The test suite starts with Ring 0 — most modern mobile web browsers clear that hurdle — and progresses to Ring 1 and Ring 2. Most mobile browsers don’t make it all the way through the Ring 1 tests, and even desktop web browsers have a hard time with some of the tests in Ring 2.

So far, only two mobile browsers have cleared Ring 1: Dolphin, a relatively obscure browser, and now the BlackBerry 10 browser. All this is, of course, part of RIM’s big plan to woo developers to BlackBerry 10, because more and better apps mean more and more satisfied users, at least theoretically.

“The browser team here at RIM has been working closely with the HTML5 experts at Facebook, who developed the Ringmark HTML5 test suite, to ensure the BlackBerry 10 browser would meet the standard,” writes Matthew Staikos today on the RIM developer blog.

“By meeting the Ringmark Ring 1 benchmark standard, developers can add a level of advanced functionality to their HTML5 apps and be confident that the BlackBerry 10 browser can execute the app without problem.”

The BlackBerry 10 team is continuing to work on the standards tested in the demanding Ring 2 benchmark and is part of the W3C CoreMob group for improving the mobile web.

Now, while all this is super duper hunky dory, we would be remiss in our duties as a**holes if we didn’t also mention that BlackBerry’s brand and business are both in huge trouble and that we have serious doubts a little (or a lot of) mobile web spit and polish will save the platform now.

RIM device mobile web share dropped 25 percent year over year, and according to some reports, many retailers are selling few or no BlackBerry units some months.

Time will tell whether this technical excellence will lead to business revitalization.

Top image courtesy of siamionau pavel, Shutterstock

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If you tried to guess which mobile browser was the first one to pass Facebook’s benchmarks, you’d be wrong.

Nope, it’s not Firefox for Android, Chrome for Android, or any of the newer mobile browsers we’ve been writing about lately. In fact, it Ringmark-passing incarnation only just launched this week.

Dolphin is its name-o, and it’s available now as a beta in the Google Play store. It successfully passed a slew of Facebook’s Ringmark tests, which were created to help bring mobile browsers up to acceptable standards of speed and usability; interestingly, it beat all the major mobile browser makers, including Apple, to the punch.

The Ringmark suite of tests starts with Ring 0, which checks for the basic, core functionality that most smartphone browsers have (for non-devs, counting in Developerlandia always starts with zero).

Most mobile browsers can pass Ring 0. Where things grow hinky is Ring 1, when the suite starts poking around more, checking to see whether the browser has access to the hardware (like the phone’s camera) and to software needed to play music and run games — you know, all the stuff that might make it actually worthwhile to build a mobile web app in the first place.

Dolphin has successfully passed Ring 0 as well as all of Ring 1, something that no other mobile web browser has done. In fact, even the web browser on your computer might not make it past Ring 1 — try it out for yourself.

The Dolphin accomplished Ring 1 passage with a few changes, including support for border-images, HTML5 forms, blob, history, WebRTC, and a few other tweaks.

“This represents a big milestone for mobile, as it will allow developers to build many of the most popular apps using web technologies,” wrote Facebooker Matt Kelly on the company blog today.

Here’s a clip showing Dolphin running Ringmark side by side with Chrome for Android and the Android default browser:

Interestingly, Facebook also announced today that its mobile-web-standards-focused Coremob group in the W3C has become the second-largest group in the consortium, right behind the HTML5 Working Group.

Without a doubt, Silicon Valley is still rabidly interested in the mobile web, and Facebook is still leading the charge. (If you ever wonder why, consider that the mobile web is Facebook’s platform-agnostic key to total domination, both on the MAUs side and on the potential app revenue side via the network’s new app center.)

Image courtesy of Peter Bernick, Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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Today, Facebook has open-sourced Ringmark, its new test suite for mobile device manufacturers.

Ringmark, which was announced just a few weeks ago at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, is designed to run “tests of core functionality that web developers need in order to build their apps.” Ringmark is all about increasing the capabilites of the mobile web across devices and platforms.

“Ultimately, we believe that web technologies are important to the future of mobile and that we can help to make HTML5 a well-supported platform for mobile developers to build upon,” Facebook engineer Matt Kelly wrote today on the Facebook developer blog.

“For those that are building with the web today, it’s a major hurdle to learn native technologies like Objective-C and Java, and we hope that an improved mobile web can unlock a large contingency of developers that could, and will, be developing for mobile.”

A slew of powerful web companies, including Mozilla and Yahoo, have taken approximately the same stance and are focusing on technologies that make the open, mobile web — not just single-platform technology stacks like Android and iOS — a fruitful environment for mobile developers.

“Forget being in love with the open web and all that touchy-feely stuff,” Mozilla VP Jay Sullivan told VentureBeat in a recent interview. “If you want to have a variety of mobile apps, it gets expensive,” he said, referring to the need to build multiple apps for all the various mobile platforms.

With technologies like Node.js and Ringmark, however, the focus is shifting from developing one-off apps for siloed platforms to ensuring that mobile web apps run and run well everywhere, including fast and reliable performance as well as beautiful user experiences.

“The mobile web has great potential but still needs a lot of work,” Kelly said. “One of the most frustrating problems was that of fragmentation in mobile browser capabilities and of understanding what’s possible on any given mobile browser.”

Ringmark is designed to increase that understanding for everyone in the mobile web app supply chain, from device manufacturers to mobile browser makers to app developers. Facebook wants it to be “the canonical testing suite” for the mobile web, allowing developers to see at a glance what works, what doesn’t work, and why — all to bring normal Joes and Janes better mobile web apps to rival the native ones designed just for their mobile OS.

Interested would-be contributors to the Ringmark suite can check out the W3C Core Mobile Web Platform Community Group as well as the Ringmark repository on GitHub.

Image courtesy of Rangizzz, Shutterstock

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Big Data and Predictive/Real-time Analytics startups: Are you looking to jumpstart development & accelerate market traction? Sign up for the SAP Startup Focus program to receive technology, support, resources and community to help you develop new applications on SAP HANA, a cutting edge database platform. Get started here, and enter promo code “VB2013″ on the form.

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