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Comment by sz4kerto | Hacker News Reader

Google's attitude towards Windows Phone shows nicely how much they strive for leveling the playing field. Or we could look at Google Maps on mobile IE -- in WP 8, it is horrible, in GDR1 it works very well, all that's changed is the user agent.

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The list of weird google bugs on WP8 is pretty long. If I search for a video on youtube sometimes the first result is an ad. It loads about 0.2 seconds later than the other results. If you click the first result before the ad loads it takes you to the ad instead of the first result! This has been the case for at least 6 months

What you say is very different from the release announcement of GDR1 which is "includes hundreds of enhancements for the mobile web".

When it comes to mobile IE performing poorly, I don't think you need to look further than the software itself.

The biggest 'improvement' they did to IE in GDR1 is faking user agents so mobile sites think it's an Android browser so the site appears correctly. At the moment, IE on WP does 100/100 in ACID3. It does not support HTML5 as well as Chrome on Android though - but I really doubt that that's the main reason why Google stuff does not work well on it (as the previous example shows it as well).

Not really true, and Google stopped blocking Windows Phone after the outrage.

See "Misspelling "Windows Phone" Makes Google Maps Work".

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

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