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Comment by freehunter | Hacker News Reader

Google blocked Windows Phone from accessing Google Maps in the browser (both the desktop and mobile versions) with the claims that IE was unsupported, even though Google Maps UK worked just fine.

Google does have a history of blocking browsers they don't support, no matter how functional it may seem.

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Yeah, they seem to use the whitelisting strategy for all of their properties. If something isn't QAed it doesn't get enabled. I suppose at that scale the support cost isn't worth the "let them use it in a degraded way" mantra most of the web community follows.

SUPPORT COST?! HA HA HA HA HA!

You can't get support out of Google at any price, unless you're an advertiser. But in that case, it's only help for your ads and nothing else.

You can't talk about "support cost" when it's zero.

"Support cost" doesn't apply only to customer support.

Go on, I'm interested - what extra cost do Google have if I use the same service in FF as I would otherwise have to switch over to Chrome to use; given that they say up front that other browsers aren't supported and that this is a beta so expected to be shonky.

What cost is there?

If I've switched UA string Google might not even be able to tell, without actively seeking out the information, that other browsers are using it - how then could that be an extra cost?

School me, please.

It takes resources (mainly developer time) to ensure that an application is working properly on multiple browsers. If you read the article you can see that a simple UA string change does not fix the problem.

There's a big difference between "provided a degraded experience in non-Chrome browsers" and "actively blocking non-Chrome browsers by means more invasive than UA checking"

Remember, there isn't any kind of really legitimate API for 100% determining which browser you're running in. There's a lot of ad-hoc methods which usually work.

These folks spent extra effort to block it from even TRYING to run in FireFox.

How are the FireFox devs supposed to see the bad performance that they need to fix for Inbox to work right if they can't run it at all?

There is also a big difference between "provided a degraded experience in non-Chrome browsers" and "you have to actively disable CSP (a global setting) for it to work in Firefox."

Also, with respect to performance, this comment in the article might shed some light:

"Also see Bugzilla entry. The use of spare arrays with huge indexes was a performance issue in Firefox. It's been fixed in Inbox and in FF but not shipped in FF yet. (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1087963)"

But we're specifically talking about not hobbling other browsers not supporting them - you (or whoever) said that there are still support costs even when a browser isn't being "supported" (ie enabled to operate with a site at a suitable level).

Did you read the part in the article about CSP?

Even if they don't support customers they still have to support internal customers (everyone that works for Google). I worked on a project recently that didn't support IE8. Nevertheless, the day after release there were a ton of emails from one particular office that the site didn't work. There was a bit of a panic, various theories thrown out (it's working for everyone else, why is it not working for this office, networking issues?). A couple of hours (and who knows how much money) was wasted in an all-hand-on-deck meeting to fix the issue before it was found out that this particular office had an IT department that only allowed XP+IE8 machines.

When you get bug reports from internal customers it's never "the site isn't working in Firefox 33 with all extensions turned off. It loads but is a little slow.". The bug report you get is simply "it isn't working, you get a blank page".

Answering those types of emails cost real money.

Support cost doesn't mean customer support.

This probably has more to do with undermining WP (which is competing with android in the low end phone market) than anything to do with browser support. They would block iOS too if they could, but they can't so that's why safari is 'supported'.

Were there differences between the IE on mobile and desktop though?

I recall back in the IE5 days that IE on Mac was a significantly different beast than IE on Windows despite being named the same.

The engine was supposedly exactly the same on WP7, on WP8 the entire browser is the same with the exception of the UI (obviously). Google Maps UK worked fine on both the mobile and desktop site views of IE on Windows Phone.

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