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Google Maps never supported IE on Windows Phone 8, and likely never will

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Re: Google Maps never supported IE on Windows Phone 8, and likely never will

#31

Post by MatthewPhillips »

CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #26
barista wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> On the one hand, this isn't really any different than Microsoft not supporting Office on Chromium. How's that the same? Web is a agreed upon standard. An OS is not.

It's the same in the sense that a company with a product isn't necessarily obligated to support all potential platforms for that product. But maybe a better comparison would be to point out that web access for Exchange was not officially supported on Chrome for many years. EDIT: To put a slightly different spin on it, it's easy to try to turn this into a moral issue rather than a business decision -- particularly wit…

Office Web Apps work fine in Chrome/Chromium.

Re: Google Maps never supported IE on Windows Phone 8, and likely never will

#32

Post by garuda »

barista wrote: post #7
robododo wrote: post #2

Bizarre. I wonder if, in 10 years, WebKit will be viewed as the next IE6 when the latest/greatest HTML rendering engine comes along? What happened to standards compliance?

The reason its not supported is not because of technological limitations. It's just anti competitive practices from Google.

There is nothing 'Anti-Competitive' about not providing your free service to customers of your competitor. If people want Google services they can choose Android.

It's worth remembering that Android was developed in the first place to be an Open alternative to prevent Windows phone from taking off. Why would they go to all the trouble of developing Android only to prop up Microsoft.

Re: Google Maps never supported IE on Windows Phone 8, and likely never will

#33

Post by bdash »

dos1 wrote: post #13
bdash wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

WebKit is constantly moving forward, and is not stagnant like IE6 was. Many of its initially-proprietary web features have been standardized and adopted by other browser engines. The primary challenge is convincing web authors to support the standardized versions of the formerly-proprietary features alongside the browser-specific versions.

Personal bias much? I see you work on Safari at Apple. How come it's OK for WebKit to extend the spec with non-standard features but it was not OK for IE 6? Sure, some of the features have been standardized and included in other browsers, but the same thing happened with IE! You can thank IE for the XmlHttpRequest after all. I can literally see no difference between IE6 adding non-standard features vs. WebKit doing i…

The major difference is that Microsoft wasn't actively working with the various web standards groups to standardize its various proprietary features. The majority of the non-standard functionality that's added to WebKit and Gecko is done with the intent of moving it on to the standards track if it is beneficial to the web platform.

Edit: If you can't see any difference between the approach to standards taken by Microsoft with IE 6 and by the people involved with WebKit, I'd suggest reevaulating your own biases.

Re: Google Maps never supported IE on Windows Phone 8, and likely never will

#34

Post by benesch »

barista wrote: post #12

Many Google engineers here. Anybody care to explain what are the technical reasons why this would be not supported?

Not a Google engineer, but I can offer a partial explanation.

As you probably know, up until the release of IE9, supporting apps across the major browsers (Safari/Chrome, Firefox, IE) was a massive PITA. Not just obscure features, either; even IE8 had some crippling misunderstandings of the CSS 2.0 standard (floats). Today desktop cross-browser problems are consistent subpixel antialiasing and less-critical CSS features like border-radius support, so it's pretty easy for an app to [mostly] work in every modern browser without testing. Plus computers are fast enough that you don't [hardly] notice IE10's stupidly slow JS engine.

On mobile, that's not the case. Web-based Google Maps taxes my iPhone 4S Safari to the limit. It's so jerky it's hardly usable. V8 (Chrome's JS engine) is faster, so Android users might have more luck, but you're pushing your phone's hardware regardless. I haven't had the misfortune of owning a Windows Phone, but knowing Microsoft's previous disregard for standards, there may be some significantly broken features of IE10 mobile (though it supposedly supports HTML5 to the same extent as its big brother). At the very least, IE10 sees fairly significant lag with a few tabs on a recent desktop computer; I imagine JS performance on a phone is horribly unusable for an app like Google Maps. Optimizing JS for IE10 mobile could be a non-trivial task with diminishing returns—it might not even be possible to get it to run acceptably.

So there's a chance that capturing the 2% of the mobile market on Windows Phone isn't cost-effective for Google. It's probably political though—demos of IE Mobile have looked decent. [1]

Hopefully a real Google engineer can provide a more definitive answer though.

[1] http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2011/02/18/watch-internet-ex...

Re: Google Maps never supported IE on Windows Phone 8, and likely never will

#35

Post by dos1 »

jmillikin wrote: post #20
dos1 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personal bias much? I see you work on Safari at Apple. How come it's OK for WebKit to extend the spec with non-standard features but it was not OK for IE 6? Sure, some of the features have been standardized and included in other browsers, but the same thing happened with IE! You can thank IE for the XmlHttpRequest after all. I can literally see no difference between IE6 adding non-standard features vs. WebKit doing i…

When Firefox, Chrome, or Safari add new features, it's with an eye toward getting those features into the appropriate standard. The goal is to have as few proprietary features as possible. Historically, IE's new features have been developed for IE and Windows only. Then when competition had been sufficiently smothered, development on IE was simply halted.

I'm all for innovation, but don't pretend that this is some altruistic plan by Google and Apple to move the web forward. It's about the same thing it was for Microsoft, keeping users tied to THEIR browser.

Let's take Google Chrome's NaCl. It's eerily reminiscent of ActiveX is it not? Sure, Google open sourced it, but Mozilla and others have repeatedly criticized it. The web is not about sandboxing native code and creating some kind of Frankenstein platform within a platform where one can execute "native" code in a web browser. I mean, it's friggin' stupid. But it's OK because Google open sourced it and proposed it as a standard, right?

Or how bout Dart? Let me rush out and build my next application in Dart, because it's going to be standardized right? I mean, Google open sourced it so everyone could implement it!

There are some good things (WebM, SPDY) that have come out of Google, but those were incremental improvements and they allowed for graceful degradation or were alternatives to existing things.

Re: Google Maps never supported IE on Windows Phone 8, and likely never will

#36

Post by garuda »

chewxy wrote: post #30
CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same in the sense that a company with a product isn't necessarily obligated to support all potential platforms for that product. But maybe a better comparison would be to point out that web access for Exchange was not officially supported on Chrome for many years. EDIT: To put a slightly different spin on it, it's easy to try to turn this into a moral issue rather than a business decision -- particularly wit…

No, it's not the same. It's one thing to say a product isn't obligated to support all potential platforms, it's another to actively disallow other platforms. If you watch this video (or time travel back to about 4 hours ago and use a useragent string modifier) [0], you'll note that using a Lumia 920's user agent string [1] will redirect you to a desktop version of the site. But now if you try it, the URL will redirec…

Why should Google provide their service for free to their competitor's customers?

Re: Google Maps never supported IE on Windows Phone 8, and likely never will

#37

Post by CurtHagenlocher »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #31
CurtHagenlocher wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the same in the sense that a company with a product isn't necessarily obligated to support all potential platforms for that product. But maybe a better comparison would be to point out that web access for Exchange was not officially supported on Chrome for many years. EDIT: To put a slightly different spin on it, it's easy to try to turn this into a moral issue rather than a business decision -- particularly wit…

Office Web Apps work fine in Chrome/Chromium.

Sure, they do now; it's a pretty sensible business decision given Chrome's market share. But there was some period of time after it came out -- I can't recall how long -- when Chrome was officially not supported by OWA (Outlook Web Access).

I work at Microsoft (but not on any product related to these) and I'm quite certain that this was the case.

Re: Google Maps never supported IE on Windows Phone 8, and likely never will

#39

Post by [deleted] »

dos1 wrote: post #35
jmillikin wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When Firefox, Chrome, or Safari add new features, it's with an eye toward getting those features into the appropriate standard. The goal is to have as few proprietary features as possible. Historically, IE's new features have been developed for IE and Windows only. Then when competition had been sufficiently smothered, development on IE was simply halted.

I'm all for innovation, but don't pretend that this is some altruistic plan by Google and Apple to move the web forward. It's about the same thing it was for Microsoft, keeping users tied to THEIR browser. Let's take Google Chrome's NaCl. It's eerily reminiscent of ActiveX is it not? Sure, Google open sourced it, but Mozilla and others have repeatedly criticized it. The web is not about sandboxing native code and cre…

[deleted]
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