Google Maps redirect issue on Windows Phones is a matter of competition | Hacker News Reader

Google Maps redirect issue on Windows Phones is a matter of competition

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76 pointscoloneltcb83 comments

The Windows Phone browser does not send touchstart or touchmove events. This alone makes it damn near impossible left to implement decent maps, so the claims that its the equivalent of IE10 is incorrect.

Its a pretty huge oversight by MS given that WebKit, Firefox and Opera do it just fine.

FWIW, IE10 on WP8 started doing touch events under vendor-specific event names. (MSPointerDown, MSPointerMove and MSPointerUp).

Yay for that. And then they turn around and scream bloody murder about the ubiquity of -webkit-prefixing. Go figure.

Err.. Opera also complained against webkit prefixes in the wild. Anyway wasn't the Touch events model held up in W3C because of Apple's patents?

No, they scream about people using the -webkit- prefix for stuff that works fine without the prefix.

Ugh, yes, makes all HTML/Phonegap apps horrible. They haven't fixed that yet? Does WP run IE6?

PhoneGap's plugin system makes it possible to hook into the native touch events and mimic touch events in the browser.

IE9 on WP7 is genuinely awful, though, and an app in that environment is guaranteed to be horrible. IE10 on WP8 is a vast improvement and is viable for HTML-based applications, though.

Are you saying that is the reason of the redirect?

If you alter the useragent on a developer device, Google Maps doesn't redirect and works just fine.

WP8, presumably? I tried with 7 but gave up, and since I can't upgrade, gave up on the platform entirely.

It was working fine enough before they started doing a user hostile redirect on the maps site. Here's a video of it atleast being functional on maps.google.lu just today.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7DyYYVl8x6g

lol i call that barely working. Barely moves and the user didn't do anything but load the site.

Here's more videos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfTS1f8vqAo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z8vfzurnKw

In the videos the position in the map is fixed. The video only shows only two uses of pinch to zoom, but it doesn't show any example of drag to move. (I don't have a Win8 phone to try :( )

If that's how it really worked, I'm starting to get the strong sense that no one on a Windows Phone ever actually used maps.google.com.

That looks completely unusable. Considering they launched the new version over a year and a half ago[1] and there was no widespread discussion (at least reaching outside of windows phone blogs) about the pain of the "interaction" those videos show, I'm not really feeling like a lot was lost here.

I would love to see a survey of Windows Phone users and how many have ever even attempted to use it. I know if I'm using a phone that can run a web browser at all, I would never even think to not use the native mapping app.

Google was wrong on the principle, but was anyone actually in the forest to be harmed? In any case, everyone should think hard before the next time you feel compelled to make a joke about testing and Opera's marketshare.

[1] http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2011/05/google-maps-on-your...

" I'm starting to get the strong sense that no one on a Windows Phone ever actually used maps.google.com."

Probably nobody did. Nokia Maps it's actually even better than google maps. I don't know why somebody would want to use maps.google.com.

I second this, Nokia Maps is awesome and the many times I used it, it has not let me down and the experience was good. Also I've noticed that my Lumia can very quickly get a GPS signal vs iPhone and some Android phones I've used; this is very useful when you need a shortcut.

It's not shenanigans, it's browser sniffing instead of feature detection, and Google does it on too many of its sites.

What's annoying about this "controversy" is that the minuscule marketshare slice that is windows phones merits this much coverage, when this is daily life for the significantly larger (in absolute number) set of Opera users, on desktop and mobile. There's also a very real reason that Mozilla has considered adding (and is going to add?) webkit prefixes to a few CSS properties.

So, sorry WP users. Unless the claim is also that the Opera/Google war is heating up like crazy, I'm pretty sure you're just being neglected. Welcome to the world of built-in user agent string spoofing just to make sites that would work fine not redirect you first.

> I'm pretty sure you're just being neglected.

First of all, when "neglect" gives Google leverage to harm a competitor in a different market (using maps to harm a mobile OS vendor), it is reasonable to think it might not be just neglect, but also strategy.

Second, neglect is bad enough by itself. Google has been phasing out support for Opera in properties like blogger.com on desktop, and now is officially on record as saying that google maps for mobile is WebKit-only. That goes against the very basic principle of an open web accessible to all, that Google used to champion.

1) any kind of anticompetitive argument like that is a dangerous road to walk down. Is Google leveraging the popularity of maps.google.com to also marginalize rockmelt? Is a "install chromeframe" interstitial on IE6 some strategy beyond "we don't want to support your browser"? there is always a line, and considering how widespread UA sniffing and webkit-only prefixes are, you would need a considerably higher bar of evidence to demonstrate any sort of strategy at work instead of just lazy front end developers.

2) This we agree on. There are very few reasons to UA string sniff to determine functionality, and redirecting based on it is about as low as you can go on that axis. Yes, there will be users that click through the "this won't work in your browser" button and still get mad at you that your site doesn't work in their browser (just see app reviews for plenty of evidence of this), but there should still be some way of trying the content for the many browsers out there that a developer just doesn't have the incentives to manually test in.

("that Google used to champion" is just dumb rhetoric, though. it ignores the very simple fact that any organization is made up of people with very different opinions and attempts to trivialize the efforts of all the people at google still working hard on web standards and their implementations. I don't agree with all of Mozilla's decisions with regard to the open web (in fact, working group mailing lists are 90% disagreeing with each other on how to advance it), but that doesn't mean that you guys now no longer champion it)

From http://www.google.com/about/company/

"Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."

Please engage with substance or just misquote "do no evil" and be done with it. If you're just providing a counterexample to "universally accessible": as I already said above, maps clearly doesn't work in Opera Mobile and it's barely useable in Firefox Mobile. It probably doesn't work on a teletype or a Speak & Spell either.

"Universally accessible" doesn't seem at odds with the fact that there's always going to be a browser support cutoff point. Google just picked a poor cutoff point in this case. It's only in light of google's commitment to cross-browser standards that this disappoints me.

... and then make it inaccessible on Windows Phone.

> Is Google leveraging the popularity of maps.google.com to also marginalize rockmelt?

If Google did prevent a browser like rockmelt, which is not a strategic threat to Google, from accessing maps, I would say that likely it is a side effect of something else. But Microsoft IS in fact a strategic threat to Google, and Google constantly thinks about how to compete effectively against it. To do otherwise would be stupid, which Google is not.

> it ignores the very simple fact that any organization is made up of people with very different opinions

Of course Google is a very large company, and has many people inside it with many different opinions (and as you say, many are great people that truly care about the open web). But like any corporation, it is hierarchical and its leaders at the top do define an overall coherent strategy for the company as a whole. A company that does not do that is doomed to failure, and there are of course plenty of examples in history.

Google's overall strategy with respect to the web has shifted in recent years, with less support for alternative browsers on desktop and especially mobile. This makes business sense for Google - supporting other browsers in some cases might help them compete against Google, which like any company Google wants to prevent. This is not unique to Google; what is, is that years ago Google was very different - it didn't have it's own browser and OS, and it supported openness on the web, that openness helped Google as a new company making money on the web. But that openness is no longer crucial to Google's strategy, and that is affecting Google's products more and more.

Maps on Opera, Ubuntu 12.10: http://i.imgur.com/KKVbj.png

Maps on Opera, Nexus 4: http://i.imgur.com/0DXVz.png

You were saying?

I was talking about a number of sites all over the web (including several at Google) that user agent string sniff and tell opera that it isn't supported, not maps specifically.

But, speaking of maps specifically, maps.google.com in desktop Opera works fine, but clearly you didn't try using Opera Mobile, because as soon as you start dragging the map, it disappears.

(at least on a galaxy nexus running jelly bean)

Maps on Opera mobile works (Nexus4). It just lags like nobody's business.

Another example that I encounter semi-regularly is Google Groups. It does user-agent sniffing to block Firefox with Javascript disabled. Change the ua to something random and it works fine without javascript.

> Internet Explorer 10 for Windows Phone 8 uses the same rendering engine as the desktop build of Internet Explorer 10, which is certainly capable of loading and running Google Maps.

This argument makes no sense. Google Maps desktop works on IE10, but Google Maps mobile is clearly a totally different site.

I think people are jumping to conclusions here.

>a totally different site.

Did you really just type that?

Why not? It's obviously not the same codebase as the desktop version of the site, why would you expect because the desktop version of the site supports IE10 that the mobile version of the site would as well?

The desktop version of maps.google.com does not work with mobile ie10 as well.

Loads WAY different JS resources:

Mobile: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/130105_QH_4GR/1/details/

IE10: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/130105_WY_4H7/1/details/

It's the same /URI/, not the same code behind the scenes. What you seem to be suggesting is analogous to saying that because two businesses share the same physical building, they're the same business (think skyscrapers).

EDIT: While I don't work for Google, I bet it's not even the same team that works on the mobile maps site vs. the desktop maps site.

This argument is ridiculous. What business sense would there be for Google to restrict access to Maps on one platform in the interest of "competition"? It's not like any potential WP8 users will be swayed over to Android just because of GMaps, considering Bing Maps is a more than adequate alternative.

Occam's razor: it's more than likely that they just don't want to invest the dev + support time to support WP8 (web or native app). It's a relatively small demographic that isn't growing that fast (yet).

Maybe in isolation. But combined with two other similar WP8/Google stories within the last week, both clearly driven by commercial issues, the case for this not being a technical issue either becomes stronger.

Or its a no one uses wp8 issue that applies to all of gooogle's portfolio. Google didn't keep maps of iPhone, even though that could have sold 10 million androids.

AFAIK they did keep turn-by-turn directions off iOS though. It's been a while since I've used an iPhone so I can't readily verify that.

They didn't, it's fully featured. In some ways it's even better than the Android app, more beautifully designed. They mentioned in their blog they'll be bringing much the same to Android soon.

Good to know. Thanks.

It's totally reasonable for Google to decide they don't want to spend the resources to support WP8 due to low usage. But here they were taking an apparently already working (even if not officially supported) site and breaking it. That's a bit less reasonable, but it could admittedly still be a technical issue.

But that clearly can't be the case for the GMail and Youtube issues. Google still continues supporting the Exchange sync protocols for business users, so there's little technical benefit in disabling it for another class of users. Likewise Google is under no obligation to make a native WP8 Youtube app -- but given they've given partners API access to Youtube in the past, clearly there's no technical reason why they couldn't also open up the API for MS to use. In either case there's no plausible way the low market share of WP8 could be the explanation.

Now, of course both of these cases could have totally benign explanations. Maybe the licensing terms of ActiveSync make it undesirable for Google to support it for free users in the future. Perhaps MS and Google can't come to a reasonable agreement about Youtube API licensing terms, and the real villain of the story is MS for trying to now score cheap publicity points with it. Or maybe Google is trying its best to smother WP8 in the cradle. And you can't ignore these other data points when looking at the motivations for these petty Maps changes.

If anyone has a counterexample I'd love to hear it, but so far as I know no one other than Microsoft (and, until recently, Google) offers Exchange ActiveSync to free users. In my opinion, that strongly suggests that Microsoft's licensing terms for ActiveSync make that economically unsustainable. If that's right, you would expect Google to drop free EAS support once the major benefit of better iPhone support was superseded by a native Gmail app, Windows Phone or no Windows Phone. One of the planned benefits of buying Sparrow, I suspect. That ''under $25 million" needed to be justified, after all.

Active sync has licensing costs to Microsoft. And Microsoft complains that Google doesn't want to pay them except for business users.

The same that it has blocking a decent YouTube app on windows phone

Why would they silently redirect? Why not have a closeable banner that reads "Your browser may not support features necessary to run this website."

Also feature detection would be preferable to user agent detection.

The real problem is that it is a slap in the face for html. What does Google think it is? Is it a presentation layer standard with ideally many implementations or is it a file format for web kit?

It's just a platform they use to deliver their services to their customers - the same way that everyone else does.

Not quite that simple. Google does at least partially own the platform and made a lot of noise about html being a better platform for being open before. Everybody else just makes a business decision what they need to support. Native, Flash, HTML, browser variations. For Google this is more of a power play, and a bit of a bait and switch as HTML was sold as being free of those power plays.

Google gives away all their client platforms as open source (i.e. Chrome and Android), so it's hardly a power play when compared with the other options.

Neither chrome nor android are fully open source. I don't see why that matters, though.

True, Chromium and AOSP are open source. I think the point is that Google are playing both games here. They can quite happily compete with the Microsofts and Apples of the world when it comes to power plays, but they also want to see what comes from giving huge amounts of code to the developer community to play with. There are logical, long term business reasons for open-sourcing projects like Chromium, AOSP, Go, V8, WebM etc.

As a Linux user I encountered countless "Internet Explorer only" sites. I even had to postpone the adoption of e-banking for a few years due to this.

I never saw Microsoft fight for me, I never saw TNW fight for me. Things only changed because Firefox and later Chrome became popular but my favorite browser (Konqueror) and its engine (KHTML, dad of webkit) still aren't supported.

Is this a matter of competition too?

First they block access to Youtube API. Now they decide to block access to Google Maps. Free and Open Web BS is just going too far. I don't think there is absolutely any part of the web which is free and open. It is conveniently used from time to time to convince people to contribute to their platforms.

"Free and open web" doesn't mean unfettered access to private parties' services, it means unfettered access to the internet itself. I.e. access to the services on the internet that private parties are willing to let you use.

Most everything on the internet is owned by someone, and the whole meaning of things being free and open is that putting something up is putting it up for everyone. Your interpretation is just "you can use the things I let you use", which is a tautology...

The "Open Web" refers to the platform being open and accessible to anyone (which is why, for instance, royalty-free patent grants are essential for any enshrined web standard), but it does not refer to the content that is communicated by that platform

It's a nuanced (and sometimes nebulous) concept, and I don't really understand what the GP post was getting at, but here's a better attempt than mine to get a handle on it by Tantek Çelik: http://tantek.com/2010/281/b1/what-is-the-open-web

I'm not sure about tautology or whatever (it seems like you're confusing the network for the endpoints), but I'll give you a metaphor.

In the US you are a "free" citizen in an "open" country. You are free to go anywhere you want on open roads. This doesn't give you the right to trespass and go into anyone's private property. If they have a fence up, you have to stay out. If they're having a yard sale, you can come in.

If Alice wants to let Bob on her property and not Eve, that doesn't make the US any less of a "free and open" country.

This is what is meant by "free and open" web. You can attempt to reach any endpoint you want without restriction, but the endpoint itself has private control over whether you are allowed to its contents or not.

Anything less is not actually freedom, because then the endpoints' freedom to determine who can use its private property is being denied.

A web that is not "free and open" is one in which your attempts to reach endpoints are interrupted and allowed or denied by a third, censoring entity. (Usually the government.) It has nothing to do with how those endpoints would respond to you on their own.

I'm very confused. Isn't it in Google's best interests to have everyone in the world using their mapping product? Why would they want to get people on new platforms used to using alternative maps, like, say, http://www.bing.com/maps/?

Something doesn't sound right here...

It confuses me, too, but they also want me to have to find an alternative to their contacts, calendar, and push-email stuff when I get my next Windows Phone device, even though they're still going to be supporting Exchange syncing for paid Apps accounts.

The sad thing is that the alternative I use might just end up being a Google Apps account... :| so they'll get some money out of that, at least (I'm assuming the free one I have right now will have to be upgraded to get the sync support added back in).

They see Google maps as a strong enough brand that they think people will avoid Windows Phone if it doesn't have it.

I think it's a good move. The last thing we need is our one chance at an Open Source OS being undermined by Microsoft.

Whatever ones views on Android's openness, this is one interesting way to defend open.

They're just trying to avoid having a single company, Microsoft, dominate the industry again.

Microsoft will never have a shot at dominating the mobile industry. What I don't understand is your willingness to support a duopoly, which is almost as bad as a monopoly.

It's not a duopoly - anyone can use Android for free, and many do.

Don't forget how much money MS makes in each handset in extortion money, that is, "patent licensing"

As some people have already been pointing out, try maps.google.com in Opera Mobile (if you have an android device handy). I honestly think they just don't care about most mobile browsers.

Google's decisions around Windows Phone are probably why:

(a) Ubuntu for mobile will not radically alter the mobile OS options for carriers and hardware manufacturers (despite its appeal to many hackers).

(b) Apple is suffering the pain of developing their own maps application.

If Google will reverse the decision once IE10 is standards compliant (touch start/end) then go Google you the people's champion.

If not, then boo Google, are you becoming the new MS?

Time will tell

There is no pointer event specification, just fyi. The previous one was scuttled by Apple's patent claims before it left Working Draft status. However, the first Working Draft of the new Pointer Events spec[1] was published about a month ago, and rapid progress is being made. It's built on Microsoft's submitted spec for the pointer event system they created for IE10 and looks like it will be better than the proposed spec it's replacing.

[1] http://www.w3.org/TR/2012/WD-pointerevents-20121211/

I might be missing the point here but what's to stop developers from building a Windows Phone application that utilizes the tile sources from google maps which uses the Google Directions API for routing purposes?

See: http://dotnetbyexample.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/google-maps-fo...

I did a similar project a couple months back on the WP7 platform and ended up using OSM + ORSM instead.

Where's the repro? What's the mechanism? Header redirect? Meta tag? JavaScript? Magic? Can this effect be replicated without a Windows Phone?

I tried setting my User-Agent to "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows NT 6.2; ARM; Trident/6.0)" and could not repro.

Try making your useragent:

"Mozilla/5.0 (compatiable, MSIE 10.0; Windows Phone 8.0; Trident/6.0; IEMobile/10.0; ARM; Touch)"

I did it in Firefox and maps.google.com redirects.

Making your useragent anything that contains "Windows Phone" makes it redirect.

I see http://maps.google.com -> http://maps.google.com/m/local -> http://www.google.com/m?site=local&;

  > GET / HTTP/1.1
  > User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatiable, MSIE 10.0; Windows Phone 8.0; Trident/6.0; IEMobile/10.0; ARM; Touch)
  > Host: maps.google.com
  > Accept: */*
  > 
  < HTTP/1.1 302 Found
  < Location: http://maps.google.com/m/local

  > GET /m/local HTTP/1.1
  > User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (compatiable, MSIE 10.0; Windows Phone 8.0; Trident/6.0; IEMobile/10.0; ARM; Touch)
  > Host: maps.google.com
  > Accept: */*
  > 
  < HTTP/1.1 302 Moved Temporarily
  < ...snip...
  < Location: http://www.google.com/m?site=local&

The final site looks like regular Google search.

Curiously, a simple miss-spelling of "Windows Phone" in the user agent seems to get it working again.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dd7RiMCrZFw

We really should not rely on the map service from these big companies. You have no idea when they will force you to do something, such as change your phone in this case.

Hear hear! Isn't that the reason why the FOSS movement came into existence? To prevent large corporations from owning the right to the software that we use in our daily lives?

What about Opera, Firefox, or Chrome on Windows Phone 8?

What I am totally flabbergasted by is the fact that Google is redirecting to Google.com without even a simple message saying that your browser is not supported. That makes no sense whatsoever to me. Can anyone explain the reason that Google can possibly have for this?

Edit:

>For the record, here is Google’s formal statement on the issue:

>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

Wonder what this means for Firefox OS then.

Probably for the same reason iOS app crashes are just an exit to the home screen (compared to Android's visible "force close" message).

Except this isn't a crash, it's something that Google is explicitly doing on their end from the reports.

I too can't help but feel like I'm missing some context, seems like Google would at least warn the user.

Google is the new Apple just as once Apple was the new Microsoft.

This is not an evil conspiracy. It's just companies working to increase their market/mind share.

Yes, how dare Google not spend engineering resources to support a niche platform which lacks many features run by a patent troll. Truly they are worse than Hitler.

For the record, the number of Microsoft products that support my platform is: 0.

What is your platform?

linux

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