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Comment by untog | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

Are you saying that is the reason of the redirect?

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