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Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

Top left. For some reason the current image on Google Maps seems to be lower resolution than the screenshot posted to the BBC.

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I think different people actually get different images om Google maps..

I can confirm. They might use your origin account country?

I can getting 2 images taken at different times when I am using Firefox or Chrome.

The Chrome one seems to be much higher quality.

Hey Google, is serving a lower-resolution image to Firefox part of leveraging a monopoly against Firefox?

Is your legal team fine with that? Is there any legitimate reason anyone could possibly identify for why you would purposefully worsen the experience for a fully compliant browser like Firefox, by lowering the resolution?

What does your legal team have to say about this?

You can get the better version in Firefox if you click Globe in the menu on the left.

thanks. do you work for Google?

No.

I think you are correct because the screenshot someone posted above in Imgur is not what I see on google maps.

Google has two sets of base images. I usually prefer the plain 2D images, but you can get their reconstructed/interpolated 3D view with false color by toggling the "Globe" option in Google Maps, or the "3D Buildings" option in Google Earth. At this particular location, the 3D view has higher resolution.

Yeah, enabling 3D view makes the car plain as day, even on Firefox.

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