For those who aren't interested in installing silverlight, it's just a street view clone, but much slower, with a fraction of the coverage, more obvious shearing when you move around and a blue circle with a person icon instead of a simple white circle for navigation.
I don't think that's really fair. I'm not finding it significantly slower here, and it handles some things worse, but others better - eg try downtown San Francisco and spin around to look up at the tops of skyscrapers...the Bing thing is handling perspective deformation much better, whereas Google Streetview introduces a lot of messy artifacts as the 3d parameters change.
It is limited and it's still beta-feeling, but I'm all in favor of the competition...having two large companies duke it out to provide the best virtual rendition of the world can only be a good thing.
(On a side note, I wonder how long before this gets used for ad placement...when I'm looking at a city street and see a store with a big Pepsi sign outside, why don't I get an ad for Pepsi if I click on it? The technology exists; if I screencap a region of interest and drop the result into Tineye, it's pretty good at finding matches for corporate logos and giving me a link to their website...)
I'm on a relatively late model macbook pro using safari with a fresh silverlight install and it's dramatically slower than street view, enough that it's difficult to navigate around.
"the Bing thing is handling perspective deformation much better, whereas Google Streetview introduces a lot of messy artifacts as the 3d parameters change."
I don't see what you are referring to. What I do see is poorer quality from the top camera on google ( http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&source=s_q&hl=en&... ), but I also see artifacts and whole blurred sections (like frosted glass) of images on bing, though it's apparently not possible to link to individual views.
And other than what I mentioned, it really, actually is just a straight up street view clone. It's not a value judgement, it's just a fact. One huge company cloned something created by another huge company. I'm not sure why any of these statements would be controversial to anyone unless they had a stake in the success of one over the other.
Well, I have no shares or commercial ties to Microsoft or Google :) and I did describe it as 'street view' to begin with...I certainly don't mean to imply it's anything other than a clone. Both have artifacts, I just like some minor technical aspects about the Bing offering but I'm not trying to sell it. I only posted it because Google hasn't had any competition for that functionality up to now.
I'm using Chrome in Win7 btw...I feel that with both Chrome (dev channel) and Silverlight the fact that you're on a Mac might explain the performance lag, seeing as neither company optimizes for that platform.
That's not the cause. I'm in Chicago right now. Street view navigation is smooth, quick and with a blur effect, while bing navigation is chunky, slow and has heavy shearing. Are you on windows? I'm not. It could be heavily optimized for windows.
Microsoft seems to have put very little effort into browser support for Chrome, it took forever to be able to send an email through a hotmail account. I have no understanding how or why a simple text field wasn't accessible, but MS somehow found a way.
Moonlight will never reach feature parity and is unable to run most of the common Silverlight apps. The chance of Silverlight working on OS X in a few years is about the same as IE working on OS X, or Office for Mac having full support for macros (if it's not clear, MS dropped support for both).
What about mobile devices? Stuff running on ARM?
More of our computing time is being moved away from PCs. If this doesn't work with a browser of with an open set of technologies, it is bound to stagnate and lead to lock-in.
It's still fair to doubt that support/performance elsewhere will remain at parity with Windows, and thus not get on that install-and-update treadmill. Microsoft's track record is not great here.
(I only have Flash because I have to; adding another clunker rich media framework with an unclear future is something I'll hold off as long as possible.)
