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Comment by krisdol | Hacker News Reader

What web technology does this use, specifically, that prevents firefox usage? Or is it just a chrome plugin they decided not to port?

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["other browsers in the near future"](https://blog.google/products/earth/welcome-home-new-google-e...), so maybe there isn't one?

I think the issues is that it uses NaCl - I assume they compiled the existing Earth engine to run on the web.

Most likely web-based Earth was launching just too early to switch from NaCl to WASM, which just shipped, and they'll port to NaCl soon.

Hasn't NaCl been abandoned? On top of the annoying browser incompatibility, this is also a pretty embarrassing case of Google's left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing.

This is a rewrite, not a recompilation.

I remember when inbox launched it could be only used under chrome/chromium. Then somebody changed their user agent in firefox to chrome and magically it started working just fine. So you might want to try that.

Looks like the first hurdle is that it's relying on the deprecated document.registerElement API from an early draft of the Web Components specs, which prevents the app from booting in Firefox.

Edit: Paul Kinlan reports that Earth is using PNaCl (https://twitter.com/Paul_Kinlan/status/854351477506277378), which means it fundamentally can't run outside of Blink.

> Paul Kinlan reports that Earth is using PNaCl (https://twitter.com/Paul_Kinlan/status/854351477506277378), which means it fundamentally can't run outside of Blink.

Reminds me of the good old days of ActiveX!

Just curious on why they would use PNaCl over WASM here? Wasn't WASM on track to becoming standard for native-speeds in the browser?

Timelines. WASM just shipped. I'm sure Earth has been working on this for years.

Probably because PNaCl is available now and was available two years ago when they say they started.

Earth uses Polymer, which works cross-platform using polyfills, so that's not what's making it Chrome-only. It's NaCl.

Either the polyfills aren't being shipped or their feature detection is broken, because I get "document.registerElement is not a function" in Firefox Nightly with a spoofed UA string, and I get marginally further if I turn on our experimental native support for Web Components: http://imgur.com/a/TgnrQ

The polyfills aren't being shipped, since Earth is using NaCl which is already Chrome-only.

Polymer's polyfills don't work very well, for what it's worth. Sometimes they get confused if things don't load from the network in the order they expect and start eating up gigabytes of RAM and all your CPU...

Can somebody fix Google's code? It's just Javascript, right?

It's just Javascript, but served from Google servers. For a fix to work for other users you'd need them to use a plugin that applies it.

At some point, it's using an API to get the map data. Is there anything that prevents non-Google hosted code from using that API?

Yes, rate-limits.

PNaCl is a binary executable format.

Is Google actually using that? That's IA-32 only. It won't run on ARM. What are they running on Chromebooks?

> Is Google actually using that? That's IA-32 only. It won't run on ARM.

Incorrect, PNaCl runs on both ARM and Intel.

NaCl (without the P) had to be separately compiled for different platforms, PNaCl is portable.

I believe Inbox had major performance issues in non-Chrome browsers at launch, which was something they fixed in the weeks following its initial release. Once those were fixed, it was opened up to other browsers.

The Firefox bug was trivial to fix, but nobody at Google bothered to report it. If they had, it would have been a non-issue by the time that Inbox was released.

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