Now Google is blocking Windows Phones from accessing maps.Google.com
wmpoweruser.com
wmpoweruser.com
Google is 302 redirecting anything with a WinPhone user agent to the main page. This may be a bug rather than an intentional thing, but it's Google's bug to be sure." Source: http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/15yx0a/after_mic...
[1] http://i.imgur.com/Hfum6.jpg
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And update here:
http://www.theverge.com/2013/1/4/3836510/windows-phone-8-use...
Seems this is 100% intentional from Google. What the fuck? I was completely blindsided by this, I couldn't imagine a huge company like Google doing this at this scale.
I don't know if it's a good move on their part, that's a different question.
It doesn't so much work that way for Google in 2013. They must be above reproach. Using their dominant leverage in one business to fiddle with competition in another would invite much unwanted government scrutiny – however chuckle-worthy the irony might be, with Microsoft now the aggrieved party.
They don't have an obligation to support tiny platforms that would cost more to support than they're worth just because Microsoft is very loud to complain about anything they do. Or subject users to a crashy experience because the site doesn't need Webkit to load but still needs it to not crash. Any more than Microsoft has to make officeupdate.microsoft.com support Firefox on Mac rather than just redirecting it to office.com like they do now.
Anything that still uses Active X is IE-only. It has been slowly dying, but it most certainly still exists, and for many years (even fairly recently) Microsoft was one of the major perpetrators. And Silverlight is almost as bad (but thankfully much less widely used). Half of Apple's web services only work or work fully with Apple's operating systems. There is no Mac OS X support on Amazon EC2 (you can certainly blame Apple for that more than Amazon, but then you're just blaming Apple instead of Amazon). I'm sure you're aware of the kerfuffle over Microsoft shoving proprietary "do it like this version of Microsoft Office" specs into the OOXML standard over strenuous objections by competitors. Almost all of Microsoft's server products rely on Active Directory for feature completeness and don't play half as well with non-Microsoft implementations of LDAP or Kerberos.
If competitors had an obligation to support competing platforms then you could find no saints in this industry.
Edit: Incidentally, I'm really enjoying the irony of you loudly and repeatedly complaining about people downvoting pro-Microsoft content (notwithstanding that this story has remained on the front page for almost a full day) while your brethren simultaneously downvote my comments instead of responding to them.
I'm very saddened by the results of the antitrust motion and I hope they get cornered again on antitrust issues. Google and Apple are the new MS, really.
Bing Maps does exist.
However, I think that a big box with notice about unsupported browser and trying about own risk would help more that redirect.
Please. Wake up and smell the coffee.
EVERY major software company has avoided the Linux market. It's because of the questionable market opportunity that is the reason not any competition issues.
More tellingly: Linux's overarching success has been in the server space (and the platform is emerging as the mobile leader). Microsoft's server software, including most notably SQL Server (derived from Sybase, originally targeted at Unix systems) isn't available for Linux. Neither are Exchange, Active Directory, Sharepoint, IIS, or Windows File Sharing. Free Software (and proprietary) alternatives and work-alikes for each exist, and in many or most cases are more successful, though AD remains a market leader.
Microsoft conquered the desktop PC market by leveraging compulsory per-CPU OS license via bundled office software to create a self-reinforcing illegal monopoly, which it then attempted to extend into the small server space. It's fought every attempt to crack any part of that stranglehold, fighting OEMs providing other operating systems (DR DOS, Novell, BeOS, Linux), by not porting its Office products (except to Mac OS X, since discontinued), and by not porting/building its server products to other platforms.
Major companies which have not avoided the Linux market include IBM, Oracle (and acquired companies Sun and PeopleWare), and Informix. Yes, all server space. I'm making a point here.
If anything Google's abuse of FRAND patents against Microsoft over the XBox 360 H.264 codec is the most egregious example of aggressive behaviour.
I fail to see how this is different than e.g. not supporting Flash on iOS devices due to poor performance and battery drain - a then-controversial move which is now seen as reasonable even outside the circles of Apple fans.
The funny thing about this is that Microsoft used to employ such methods to harm the competition, or so it was claimed (regarding WordPerfect etc.).
It's also mildly amusing that a lot of people still believe the "Don't Be Evil" credo Google used to have.
There is however a native Google Maps app which works just fine.
Interesting, given Google's statement regarding why maps cannot be used.
This is ridiculous. User agent checking / "This site is best viewed with" in my 2013, by Google. What happened to their "Don't be a monkey armed with a hand grenade" motto?
(I understand that might be loose journalism)
Anyway yours is a very bad example since Windows Update needs an ActiveX component to update the OS itself, which is not amenable to web standards, unlike a mapping service.
The mobile web version of Google Maps is optimized for WebKit browsers such as Chrome and Safari. However, since Internet Explorer is not a WebKit browser, Windows Phone devices are not able to access Google Maps for the mobile web.
Microsoft's response:
Internet Explorer in Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 use the same rendering engine.
It's time to mourn the Google we looked up to. It no longer exists. What we have now is Microsoft and another Microsoft.
Are they really trying to screw up interoperability on the web like some two-bit banking website in 1999 that only worked with Internet Explorer?
Does Google not understand that they have more to lose than anyone if retaliatory User-agent sniffing screws up the open web?
Is there a legitimate reason for this?
(It won't help you on the anonymity standpoint of course, because every Chrome has unique id that's recorded when you log into any google service)
It's the "we require login to access any google docs documents if you use chrome, but don't need it if you use other browser" that's more annoying than web apps in my opinions.
Or perhaps Google is planning a future rebranding to Android Maps.
I'll happily concede that they should display an opt-out-able "your browser is unsupported" message.
No it's not. You don't understand how the Web works. Please delete your comment and then, optionally, your account.
Now it seems Google is doing pay-back by crippling Microsoft's Phone efforts by not offering their services on them. I can't feel sorry for Microsoft in the least, it seems like finally they are subjected to 'what you reap is what you sow'.
Regardless who the victims are its a bad move for anybody who believes in open web standards.
Thankfully ie6 is no longer and issue and there are many frameworks that making building websites for ie7/8 along with the others a snap. Wish there was something for html emails cause i was just cursing microsoft and wishing they'd hurry up and go extinct.
Do you curse Apple because of Safari 1? Which is actually newer than IE6?
Microsoft's greatest fault here is that they haven't been able to get people to upgrade their OS fast enough. An odd reason to curse them. And an odder reason still to flag their articles and push Google articles.
I get that everyone will have some bias, but the amount of bias doesn't seem justified, IMO.
You can develop in Chrome and it just works in Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc., but without fail things are always broken in IE (yes also in 6+ versions). Any webdev could tell you about the horrors.
IE versions have always been DOA compared to what’s possible in competing browsers at the time. Microsoft's fault of not getting people to upgrade is their own doing by not anticipating and adequately reacting to the problem… or frankly just not giving a shit™. Others don’t have these upgrade problems.
Also, we can be very thankful that they failed in their ploy to make the whole web IE-specific, but we should not forget and it’s to soon to forgive.
Arguably windows was one of the key ingredients in the soup that allowed the web to take off (the others: universal access to the net, Peter Tattam's trumpet winsock, the mosaic browser and ncsa httpd).
And yet, in spite of all that I have no problem with crediting them with those things they actually did.
I did not claim Microsoft invented it all, I did not say that nobody else would have been able to produce an alternative, I did not say it was very innovative, nor did I claim they got there in an ethically sound way.
But they did what they did and no amount of living in denial is going to undo that.
Your argument is about the same as telling North Korean citizens they have to thank the Dear Leader for the good things they have. Technically correct but horribly lacking in perspective.
Reading comprehension fail.
I said that the web took off when and in the way it did in part because of microsoft, not that it would not have happened without microsoft.
I don’t even...
I say this because I used to help out a lot of family/friends with their computer issues, and the vast majority of them during the time were using AOL or Compuserve for their internet access which had its own browser and didn't use IE at all (until several years later when they started using it).
Similarly, packages from BT (in the UK, the main phone line provider) shipped installs of Netscape, and to use it, the average user would have to use that (because they couldn't cope with the Dial-up-networking part of Windows as it was too complicated). They'd just double-click the "BT Internet" icon on the desktop, which would start Netscape and automatically dial up to their ISP.
In fact, I distinctly remember trying to convert several people from Netscape to IE, and this was with Windows 98. (I remember showing them active desktop).
The same could be said for IE6. They again pushed a inferior product to market through questionable business tactics making a purposely broken browser the dominant player for a very long time. Its interesting to imagine where the web and personal computing would be today if neither of those two things had happened...
That's not true. You have false memory of things that never happened. When IE6 came out, it was nothing short of incredible.
Even the wiki page for IE6 states (among many other negative things):
"This version of Internet Explorer is currently widely criticized for its security issues and lack of support for modern web standards, making frequent appearances in "worst tech products of all time" lists, with some publications labelling it as the "least secure software on the planet."
However it is wiki, so please do tell, what exactly made the release of IE6 so incredible when compared the the other browsers of its time??
(either way an interesting timeline graphic of web browsers: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_timeline)
IE6 was released in 2001, and at the time it was great. The fact that MS stopped working on it and the fact that most corporate IT networks stayed on it so long when the rest of the world had moved on are what gave it a bad name in the years since. But when it was released, it was great.
I've been a die-hard Microsoft hater since I was a teenager. Even so, there was a period from 2000-2004 when I used IE, because it was so clearly better than any other browser on the Internet. I gave up Netscape reluctantly, but when it just hung on half the sites of the Internet because it was so buggy, it was time to switch.
I take it you don't remember coding <layer> tags and working with Netscape's broken & nonstandard DOM implementation either, nor laying everything out with tables and spacer GIFs because it didn't support CSS. It used to be we'd get our pages to work in IE first, and then the boss would grudgingly say "And you've gotta make it work in Netscape too." (That was actually what got me my first full-time job...they called me in for an interview and during it I worked around a nasty layers bug that they hadn't been able to figure out.)
At the time, Netscape 4 was a bloated, buggy joke, and was happily doing stupid stuff like re-downloading the content it was displaying when you resized the main window because its caching was so atrocious. And this was in the days of 28.8k / 56.6k modems, so if you resized the window, you'd probably be waiting 30+ seconds for the webpage to redownload and redraw, during which Netscape would either lock up or display a blank page, whereas in IE it could instantly resize with the content it had locally. That meant a huge amount in those days.
Well again my angst isn't about legacy IE cause indeed MS has moved forward in this regards & frameworks (i.e. boilerplate) make it easy to code for ie7 on up, but their outlook clients uses a form of MS Word to render html emails. Prior to 2007 they didnt use MS Word and older outlook clients are more simple to deal with in rendering your HTML emails perfectly. Though why in 2007 did they switch to a worse and more complicated rendering technology and then in 2010 stick with the same crap and then the latest 2013 remain sticking with the same crap rendering engine? It's all about money I am sure but in the end it only hurts them, as us techies loathe them and we are the innovators and early adopters.
However, sometimes people seem to flag posts because they don't want them see by HN readers. I've seen this happen to a lot of links to stories that aren't charitable to Google/Apple or are friendly to Microsoft even if they're legitimate news stories or even just announcements.
Edit: HN Rankings shows a huge plunge from #2 to #50 in five minutes http://hnrankings.info/5010891/
Also wanted to mention that lately I've seen even some Apple news and announcements get flagged a lot. I speculate Google/Android fans/employees/shareholders are going a bit overboard. :)
Looks like an innocent mistake, however. Or they decided they wouldn't support IEMobile 9.
Google has even come out and said that mobile Google Maps is only for WebKit engines. The open web is no longer about web standards apparently -- it's about one specific rendering engine.
If it's indeed old, the timing is suspect since Google just avoided sanctions from the FTC. MS lobbied hard to get Google penalized.
If it were up to me, I wouldnt have my developers waste the effort on a browser/device that doesnt matter. However, I have not targeted the newest version of mobile IE, it is on my list, I have read that it is magnitudes better than what they originally shipped.
Anyway Google has come out with a statement saying that only webkit is supported on mobile for maps.
See wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Bing