

Google Maps never supported IE on Windows Phone 8, and likely never will - derpenxyne
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/01/05/the-windows-phone-8-google-maps-kerfuffle-is-contrived-google-maps-never-supported-ie-on-wp8/

======
derpenxyne
UPDATE: A Microsoft spokesperson has responded to Google saying that:

"Internet Explorer in Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 use the same rendering
engine."

It appears that <http://maps.google.com> worked fine on Windows Phone until
Google started blocking it. In fact it is still working on the Lumia 920 if I
go to <http://maps.google.co.uk> as it looks like they forgot to redirect that
one. Are there differences between how it works on Windows Phone and on webkit
based mobile browsers? To say that "Since Internet Explorer is not a WebKit
browser, Windows Phone devices are not able to access Google Maps for the
mobile web" is simply not true. Internet Explorer on the desktop is not a
WebKit browser and it works fine with Google maps.

It seems as though the reason that Windows Phone can't access Google Maps is
that Google decided (for reasons they would need to explain) to start blocking
Windows Phone users.

------
MatthewPhillips
Google is taking the bizarre position that only iOS and Android exist on
mobile (and only the official browsers of those platforms).

I don't ever remember Google Maps being blocked in Konqueror or IceCat, so I'm
not sure why they are using this tactic on mobile. More importantly, a lot of
good-citizen webdevs work at Google like Paul Irish, must be rather awkward
for those types.

~~~
46Bit
I can't help but wonder if Google are trying to ensure they stay as the major
non-Apple player. For all the popularity of Android, it is a far less
interesting offering for a long-term iPhone user than Windows Phone.

~~~
jmcdonald-ut
I wonder the same thing. It seems like Google is trying to make Windows
attempt to enter the market as painful, and played out, as possible. (I'm
talking about Windows Phone 8, obviously they've been players for a while).

~~~
YeahKIA
And this just days after FTC cleared them if any misbehavior. Bravo!

~~~
garuda
The FTC cleared them of antitrust. This is just normal business competition.

~~~
kenjackson
But the EU hasn't. :-)

~~~
SirPulse
Well if EU can be influenced by lobbying as FTC can be then EU will clear them
as well

------
chewxy
And yet... you can use it to visit maps.google.co.uk [0].

Stop making excuses for Google. This is ridiculous ffs.

[0] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z8vfzurnKw>

~~~
jmillikin
Note that the video shows the user able to access the desktop version, but the
article is about accessing the mobile version. Here's what the mobile UI looks
like: <http://i.imgur.com/oCveo.png>

~~~
barista
well neither works on windows phone.

------
robododo
Bizarre.

I wonder if, in 10 years, WebKit will be viewed as the next IE6 when the
latest/greatest HTML rendering engine comes along?

What happened to standards compliance?

~~~
barista
The reason its not supported is not because of technological limitations. It's
just anti competitive practices from Google.

~~~
garuda
There is nothing 'Anti-Competitive' about not providing your free service to
customers of your competitor. If people want Google services they can choose
Android.

It's worth remembering that Android was developed in the first place to be an
Open alternative to prevent Windows phone from taking off. Why would they go
to all the trouble of developing Android only to prop up Microsoft.

~~~
kvb
Of course it's anti-competitive! They took something that was working on a
competitor's phone platform and intentionally caused it to stop working. It's
probably not _illegal_ , but if it's designed to harm a competitor it is by
definition anti-competitive.

~~~
garuda
Not adding value to your competitor's products for free is simply
_competitive_ and part of normal business. "Anti-competitive" is a different
thing and means using market power to suppress competition, whereas this move
is about intensifying it.

~~~
kvb
First of all, forget "not adding value to your competitor's product" - this is
about removing value that was already there.

Secondly, Google has market power in both the mobile device OS market and the
online map market compared to MS, and is trying to leverage its position in
the latter to hurt MS in the former. This seems like exactly your stated
definition of anti-competitive behavior. How is this "intensifying"
competition?

~~~
garuda
There are multiple players in the map market, Microsoft themselves being one
of them. Google are competing against Microsoft by asking customers to choose
between their integrated mobile offerings rather than supporting Microsoft by
giving them a second maps option for free.

------
CurtHagenlocher
On the one hand, this isn't really any different than Microsoft not supporting
Office on Chromium.

On the other hand, isn't the whole point of web standards to avoid situations
like this?

I suspect we'll just get confirmation of something we really already know:
standards are really important only when you're not the market leader.

~~~
barista
> On the one hand, this isn't really any different than Microsoft not
> supporting Office on Chromium.

How's that the same? Web is a agreed upon standard. An OS is not.

~~~
CurtHagenlocher
It's the same in the sense that a company with a product isn't necessarily
obligated to support all potential platforms for that product. But maybe a
better comparison would be to point out that web access for Exchange was not
officially supported on Chrome for many years.

EDIT: To put a slightly different spin on it, it's easy to try to turn this
into a moral issue rather than a business decision -- particularly with
Google's foolishly-publicized "don't be evil" motto. But supporting multiple
platforms requires additional resources, and companies have to make the
business decision whether or not to provide them.

~~~
chewxy
No, it's not the same. It's one thing to say a product isn't obligated to
support all potential platforms, it's another to actively disallow other
platforms.

If you watch this video (or time travel back to about 4 hours ago and use a
useragent string modifier) [0], you'll note that using a Lumia 920's user
agent string [1] will redirect you to a desktop version of the site.

But now if you try it, the URL will redirect to the main search page.

[0] <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z8vfzurnKw>

[1] Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows Phone 8.0; Trident/6.0;
IEMobile/10.0; ARM; Touch; NOKIA; Lumia 920)

~~~
garuda
Why should Google provide their service for free to their competitor's
customers?

~~~
bdash
If that is the logic involved then why is iOS not affected?

~~~
garuda
Because iOS is still influential and they are hedging their bets.

------
naner
_The mobile web version of Google Maps is optimized for WebKit browsers such
as Chrome and Safari._

Does it work with mobile gecko?

~~~
jmillikin
Sort of; using Firefox 17, the mobile UI loads, but is very jerky and zoom
doesn't seem to work.

Regardless, I think Google Maps should try to draw something (no matter what
browser the user has), with a big "unsupported browser" box. Redirecting to
the home page is a user-hostile behavior.

------
so898
Don't be evil, Google. Please remember it.

~~~
garuda
Google have provided a free, open source alternative to Windows Phone. There
is nothing 'evil' about them not supporting other platforms.

~~~
wrath
Of course it's evil. Redirecting a user is hostile in nature and was surely
done to piss off microsoft. What wouldn't be evil is putting a banner stating
that the browser is not supported.

I get that google needs to make money, I'm fine with it, but don't for one
minute think they are the good guys anymore. They are as evil as any other
public company. Sad but true.

~~~
garuda
They're the only ones providing an Open Source mobile OS. Without them, we'd
have only proprietary solutions controlled by single corporations.

Having put in all this effort to provide an open solution, they need to be
somewhat competitive to make it succeed, otherwise it would likely languish
the way the Linux desktop has.

------
schuke
As a Windows Phone user in China, the feeling is very familiar. Bravo, Google,
you've certainly learned a few tricks from the bloody Communists.

------
Steko
I imagine there's a good market for a meta-mapping app that lets the user
easily switch their views from various mapping services and providers. It
would essentially be a webview that kept each map open on a different tab but
with a smarter custom ui and animations for switching.

------
malachismith
IE across ALL mobile devices currently represents less than 2% market share
according to NetMarketShare. In other words, less than the Blackberry browser.
Would you optimize YOUR product for that?

~~~
barista
Who said anything about optimizing here? Supporting and optimizing are two
separate things.

~~~
malachismith
OK. Would you do the work to make your product SUPPORT 2% of the market?

~~~
kenjackson
It works fine today. No work is needed by Google. They did more work to
redirect the traffic.

~~~
Turing_Machine
Maybe Google is tired of the ongoing maintenance hassle and doesn't want to
pay to write all the special-case code that will be necessary to support IE in
future versions of their maps product.

From what I'm seeing, and to take just one example, IE 10 still doesn't
support touch pan and zoom on mobile, which strikes me as a useful thing for a
map application.

------
jumpbug
i think the funniest thing is, it actually took this long for somebody to
notice

~~~
barista
nothing funny. Windows phone already has nice bing maps and nokia maps
integration so nobody needed Google maps. But that's not the point...

------
barista
Many Google engineers here. Anybody care to explain what are the technical
reasons why this would be not supported?

~~~
benesch
Not a Google engineer, but I can offer a partial explanation.

As you probably know, up until the release of IE9, supporting apps across the
major browsers (Safari/Chrome, Firefox, IE) was a massive PITA. Not just
obscure features, either; even IE8 had some crippling misunderstandings of the
CSS 2.0 standard (floats). Today desktop cross-browser problems are consistent
subpixel antialiasing and less-critical CSS features like border-radius
support, so it's pretty easy for an app to [mostly] work in every modern
browser without testing. Plus computers are fast enough that you don't
[hardly] notice IE10's stupidly slow JS engine.

On mobile, that's not the case. Web-based Google Maps taxes my iPhone 4S
Safari to the limit. It's so jerky it's hardly usable. V8 (Chrome's JS engine)
is faster, so Android users might have more luck, but you're pushing your
phone's hardware regardless. I haven't had the misfortune of owning a Windows
Phone, but knowing Microsoft's previous disregard for standards, there may be
some significantly broken features of IE10 mobile (though it supposedly
supports HTML5 to the same extent as its big brother). At the very least, IE10
sees fairly significant lag with a few tabs on a recent desktop computer; I
imagine JS performance on a phone is horribly unusable for an app like Google
Maps. Optimizing JS for IE10 mobile could be a non-trivial task with
diminishing returns—it might not even be possible to get it to run acceptably.

So there's a chance that capturing the 2% of the mobile market on Windows
Phone isn't cost-effective for Google. It's probably political though—demos of
IE Mobile have looked decent. [1]

Hopefully a real Google engineer can provide a more definitive answer though.

[1] [http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/02/18/watch-internet-
ex...](http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/02/18/watch-internet-explorer-
mobile-9-demo-new-html5-powers/)

~~~
barista
AFAIK, IE10 on mobile has the same JS engine as the desktop one. What data you
have to say that it is slow? This benchmark says its the fastest:

<http://crockford.com/javascript/performance.html>

Besides how do you explain the uk site that was working already that then got
blocked?

~~~
benesch
All anecdotal. Maybe it's Trident (the rendering engine) then, but it really
hangs for me after a few tabs.

(Exactly. It's probably political as I mentioned before.)

