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.
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.
"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
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 e…
From http://www.google.com/about/company/ "Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."
... and then make it inaccessible on Windows Phone.
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.
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 E…
Active sync has licensing costs to Microsoft. And Microsoft complains that Google doesn't want to pay them except for business users.
Here's more videos. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfTS1f8vqAo http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z8vfzurnKw
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 w…
" 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.
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 w…
" 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.