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Comment by FLUX-YOU | Hacker News Reader

>Verdict: Cartography catastrophe.

As much as I hate JavaScript, Google Maps gets a pass. I'm pretty sure the code behind it is thoroughly tested. We can just suck it up and turn JavaScript on for one of the most useful tools from the internet -- how hard is it to find something that whitelists domains to run JS anyway?

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While I agree with you, I still want to give them points for admitting their failure. It's a cute image, with a cute line that tells you exactly what the problem is.

Compare that to sites where you just get a blank page.

Firefox has Noscript, and perhaps another tool i forget the name of (never tested it). Not sure if there is anything similar for Chrome (and the various offshots/rebrands) or Edge, never mind IE or Safari.

uBlock Matrix has very fine whitelisting controls.

If I recall correctly there was an old version of Google Maps which worked without JS. It was before they replaced the old snappy and functional Google Maps with the bloated and slow app we have now.

Google maps is a useful tool.

It also had a habit of freezing an older (core2) laptop I was still using completely (with Firefox). Not just the browser, the whole OS. Had to power cycle. From time to time I'd forget and go back to Google maps were the cycle would repeat.

Why was I still using a core2? Because it worked fine for almost everything else. Got a better second laptop and no more issues but still... there wasn't anything wrong with the first.

It's probably WebGL-related. Some Firefox update seems to have fixed it for me recently but for quite a while I could only visit Google Maps in a brand new Firefox instance, because any attempt to use it in a well-aged process would crash firefox and emit graphics errors to dmesg. You may have a poorly-supported WebGL stack.

Agreed, I just dusted off an old laptop with 14.04 ubuntu (or maybe it was 14.05) and tried to run a webgl app I'm making off of local host and the whole computer nearly locked up (after updating firefox too). Chrome ran it at 60fps easy with whatever version was installed on the computer three years ago.

Now that I've updated to 16.04 firefox runs better than it did but chrome still blows it away.

There should be something as a fallback, though, surely? Take out all the functionality, by all means, but at least give me a map image. If you can't even get link-to-zoom working to display different images, just give me a map image based on my IP location; give me anything rather than nothing.

Can you do lazy loading with just HTML and CSS? You can load the map around the GPS coordinates you start on, but what if you go 20 miles north? How do you: A) figure out what are the new GPS coordinates that your viewport is looking at? And B) load the map within the viewport centered around the new GPS coordinates that you're looking at without ajax?

How would you "go 20 miles north" without JavaScript? The only sensible way would be by clicking a link, at which point you can load your new tiles.

I think OpenLayers did this a looooooong time ago.

Google maps did this a looooooong time ago.

Even if you could just put in two addresses and get directions, that would be better than nothing.

They did provide a fallback, old MapQuest-like UI without JS until a few years ago. Then they stopped, possibly because of the lack of users.

Remember the HTML map tag? [1]. There is a huge amount they could do to make maps usable without JS (or even CSS). Zooming and panning would be pretty easy to implement, but would involve reloading the page with new coords.

1. https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Web/HTML/Element/map

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