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Google Backs Down On Maps Redirect
Dupple writes "A few days ago Google blocked access to its maps on Windows Phone 8, claiming that it 'worked best' on WebKit-based browsers — effectively excluding WP8 users. This, despite Google Maps working fine on desktop versions of IE that use the same rendering engine and users being able to spoof the user agent string on their WP8 devices to gain access. Now it appears that Google has backed down and is now allowing WP8 users access."
How soon they forget.
This whole idea that Google wants to shut device users out from their services is beyond stupid. Google wants one thing - to make money serving up ads. They want users of ALL devices looking at their maps, using their search, using their gmail, etc, etc, etc.
That's pretty much what it boils down to.
On one hand there's the chance to let Microsoft swallow some of its own medicine (especially after MS has pissed off web developers for years) and on the other hand there's the data that Google could use to its advantage.
A few weeks ago, Google Maps started acting flaky. This was amazing because Google is supposed to be the best at web development. In any case, it was clearly a situation where they just made things needlessly complex. Like MS used to do and still does. It will be googles downfall if the continue to game the market instead of just developing innovative products. And really it will be a shame. They are competent, but if they fall to fear, and the desire for profit instead of providing end users the best product, it will not end well. I hate to say it, but Bing and the MS WIndows Phone are competitive, and they are competative because Google has just been sitting back thinking how they can screw people.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I think you mean U-turn
"What Are They Gonna Do When Were All Using Freenet"
This is a perfect example of why no company should have monopolistic power.
Yeah. Except... there is that little think called Bing Maps, which does more or less what Google Maps does and is even owned by the company who's mobile browser couldn't access Google Maps.
So, no monopoly here.
There ought to be a meeting between big browser makers to come up with a standard version of HTML that fixes this platform-specific web app mess. Maybe one of Google's employees can author it.
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
Well, as a Opera user I can use pretty much any website that works with Firefox or Chrome. As long as the designer of that page didn't artificially exclude Opera or I mask my browser as Firefox or IE.
The problem is not Opera but bullshit web designers.
Not sure rolfwind is saying Google is a monopoly. Just like Apple, Google is showing anti-competitive behaviour, that demonstrates they would do far worse if they actually did have a monopoly or significant majority.
Not that I'm in any way supporting Microsoft's browser. Those bastards held back web development for a good decade, so a little Schadenfreude is in order.
My Lumia 920 with WP8 still redirects maps.google.com to the Google homepage.
It's been covered repeatedly that Google makes more from iPhone than from Android: http://gizmodo.com/5897457/google-makes-four-times-more-money-from-ios-than-android. I don't know what the comparison will be with Windows phone, but it is a source of revenue. And some people will be required to carry a Windows phone device by their companies. Google would surely want a piece of that action.
to where its money is coming from: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/mar/29/google-earns-more-iphone-android. Way more money per iPhone user than Android user.
Yes, if you could block the Google ads and replace them with your own you'd be doing well.
The mobile version of google maps uses touch events not supported by IE10 mobile, it has nothing to do with the rendering engine!
So they will get google maps but not with the best experience.
and I'm a huge Google Products fan boy.
That being said, this is stupid, and 'evil' (For their use of 'evil', not "just like the Nazi's" evil).
Intentionally blocking any browser is insane. They have tools already for saying "This version of this browser is known not to work well with this product", without needing to block the product entirely. It's nothing more than Google leveraging its position to block Windows Phone 8 - which is a shitty, cheap thing to do, and something they would have bitched like hell about if MS had done it back when they were the big dog.
It's something I really wouldn't have associated with Google, so clearly I need to re-evaluate my thoughts on them. I didn't see them as a Saint - in fact I viewed all transactions as "I pay for this product with my personally identifiable information so you can sell more ads". But that MO would require them to allow as many people to use their services as possible - not blocking people in some sort of petty attack.
You don't have to be a Windows Phone user to be offended by this.
Actually when it comes to navigation, WP uses nokia maps as base. Those are ahead of google map by a very big margin in terms of accuracy, as they use NavTeq mapping data.
NavTeq collects mapping data from paid local agents and organisations, and has been doing so before Google came to existence.
Can anyone tell me if IE10 on Windows Phone 8 supports location via the browser?
If it can, surely Google win, MS win (by not having their phone blocked by arguably the market leader in consumer digital mapping) and the users of the phones win?
Assume you are google. You obviously test your services for compatibility on some devices and you figure out that maps is basically unusable for a specific user group, which is less than 3.5 percent of all your users. They give negative feedback since they believe they device froze or something, and are as noisy as 20% percent of the other users. Now you decide to place some sign wich says:"sorry doesnt work right now." I think there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.
There are enough sources of free and paid for electronic maps on mobile devices. Nokia offers maps, some navigation system providers have apps, and osm also exists. Yipp. I tried it. Its very well possible to live without google maps.
The best part is that the writer of the original article demand detailed infromation from google but whenever he talks about his own (seemingly contradicting) experiences, the article contains a lot of "i am virtually sure" phrases and 'it mast have been in that way' logic.
I don't get why anti-competitive abuse shouldn't be decried if the company is a non monopoly. Otherwise you end up with a few actors controlling the whole market and raising the bar for entry and colluding to raise prices. For a big example, see the US wireless carrier market.
This space for rent.
Not even RIM looks on MS's mobile offerings with jealousy.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Google made android NOT to lock people into Android but to avoid being locked out of iOS and Windows Phone and Symbian and Blackberry. Okay, so the last three ain't a threat anymore (or in one case, ever) but we saw what Apple tried to pull, lock Google Maps out and force people to use Apple Maps. Which was an amazing success story for Apple... well... this time. But next time?
Google developed Chrome to push web browser development because they didn't want to wait for IE or Firefox to get off their lazy ass. Especially IE, they made a capable fast browser designed to deal with any futuristic Google wishes to develop and the rest of the browsers either had to catch up OR be replaced.
Google KNOWS that in order to sell petrol, you need to sell cars. Well okay, that in order to sell inkjet ink, you need to sell printers. Google Maps could never have run well enough to replace Tom Tom on IE6, so Google pushed IE6.
And Google knows that on tightly controlled devices like mobile phones were it used to be the norm that the telecoms decided what was and was not available, they could all to easily be replaced. All of their services. So they rolled their own phone just to make sure they couldn't be completely locked out. Google isn't intrested in selling browsers or mobile phones, it primary interest is making its services so widely available that all who want to use it, can use it and then see the ads, that Google serves and makes it money from.
Google has given everyone a fast car, so we will buy lots of petrol. Given everyone a printer so they can sell lots of ink. Make web services supported by ads capable of replacing dedication payed for applications, so Google can sell ad space rather then software.
In order to operate in the open market space it needs to hang up its ads, it has ended up building most of the market. Quite funny if you think about it, because ANY of the other players could have had Androids market share but none did.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Please stop living in the past.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/kellyclay/2012/12/21/windows-phone-now-third-most-popular-platform-in-u-s/
Windows hat upwards from 90% of the desktop market.
Google has, what, 50-70%, depending on country/region?
if anything this is Google tightening their grip on mapping. People don't complain about what they don't care about and there is no way to make money if no one uses your services.
Microsoft was already evil. Blocking Google from IE would have just been one more evil act floating in a sea of evil.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
You're forgetting that "vendor lockin" thing with the OEM's. "If you want to sell Windows, then you can ONLY sell Windows OS's." Remember that? BECAUSE of that little bit of arm twisting, then no OEM could afford to be locked out of Windows, so they ALL agreed to those terms.
That was a very effective monopoly. Worldwide, Microsoft has owned more than 90% of all desktops for how long now? Definitely a monopoly.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Google's new motto: Only be a little bit evil.
Its not W3C standard. Under that arguement IE6 wins them all with the most hidden features.
http://saveie6.com/
Windows hat upwards from 90% of the desktop market. Google has, what, 50-70%, depending on country/region?
Depending on whose numbers you use, Google has 70-80% share in US (Comscore being the lowest, with just below 70%, NetApps and other measurement services pegging it higher), 80%-90% WW, and in Europe 90+% (as high as 95+% in many markets). And that is if you are measuring searches, their share is significantly higher on revenue, because they are the only actor in the market with enough critical mass in the ad auction system
Latest US ComScore: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2232359/Google-Takes-67-Search-Engine-Market-Share One by country list: http://returnonnow.com/2012/06/search-engine-market-share-country/
Not arguing that Windows doesn't have a high marketshare (at least on traditional PCs, there was a story recently that the true market share on computing devices - including tablets and smartphones etc - was around 20%). But Google has a stronger dominance than many think. As for arguing monopoly or not, that is a different discussion, just jumping in on the numbers here.
I don't know why people perpetuate this myth, there's actually nothing particularly good about NavTeq mapping data, I've found it to be quite bad, and much slower to update that Google maps.
As for local agents, well, with Google's ground truth project they've been getting more accurate depictions of more countries than absolutely anyone for a little while now. They've been mapping places NavTeq had never even been.
Further to this, Google is way ahead of Nokia in terms of gathering data from their street view project in terms of interpreting road signs and applying them to their maps (one way systems etc.) which means the divide is likely only going to get bigger.
I guess perhaps it probably depends someone on your country, but certainly here in the UK, NavTeq is one of the weakest players. Garmin satnav always used their maps and Garmin kit was always inferior to TomTom. TomTom did even try using NavTeq for a short period but dropped them for precisely the reason that they were shit in comparison to their main provider - TeleAtlas.
Honestly, the myth of NavTeq's supposed superiority seems to be brewed from little more than a hate for Google and/or those desperate to suggest Nokia still has a future rather than being based on any real actual kind of reality, because in reality, NavTeq has given Nokia a start for their mapping application, but certainly never gave them anything that puts them ahead of Google maps, and certainly does nothing to change the fact that Nokia just isn't position to even catch up with Google given Google's massively superior capabilities in data processing and vastly larger user contribution in improving their maps product.
It's also a little dishonest to suggest NavTeq collecting data before Google came into existence has any relevance to the discussion too, it's not like Google didn't buy mapping data from mapping companies that stem back even farther still to get itself started - companies that unsuprisingly again were mostly the likes of TeleAtlas rather than NavTeq, precisely because NavTeq was the worst in the pool of options when Google were getting started with mapping, and remain so to this day.
Google just found out exactly how many people, who own Windows phones, use Google Maps.
Unequivocally the realest of the realz...
They are not a search monopoly because there are dozens of other search providers (bing, ask, yahoo, duckduckgo, yandex. aol) and you can switch to any of them at a moments notice, its just that the rest a rubbish.
---Saying gnome 3 is better than windows 8 not so much a compliment as it is damning with light praise.
...and apps on X have been doing it for decades. Still remember xeyes in the mid-90s on my Linux box. Written in 1988...
They just gave the stray users who've been using Google Maps on Windows Phone another reason to switch to Here Maps.
My exception safety is -fno-exceptions.
...you do realize RIM has copied the live tile look for their new OS?
http://wmpoweruser.com/rim-please-stop-flattering-windows-phone/
In the last 12 weeks, of the number of smartphones sold, 53% were Apple, 41.9% were Android, and 2.7% were Microsoft. This only accounts for the last 12 weeks. I have heard of some consolation prizes being unworthy of their title, but this one takes the cake. And the title totally misleading.
If your argument was valid, then Microsoft's lock-in of the desktop market at 90%+ was irrelevant as anyone could switch to Linux or Mac at the drop of a hat. That obviously wasn't happening as there are more factors in play than just having other options available.
The simple fact is, that the Windows phone browser worked just fine, and used the same engine as the desktop, which was not blocked. When you spoofed the user agent header, it also worked fine on the Windows Phone.
I suspect Google saw that they went to far, and backed off. Was it evil? Probably not. Dickish? Probably. Anti-competetive? Possibly since Android is the dominant OS in the market, and Windows is by far one of of the weakest competitors.
"If you want to sell Windows, then you can ONLY sell Windows OS's."
That is where Microsoft got itself on the wrong side of the law. Giving away a product others pay for (Web browser / Netscape), isn't the nicest thing to do, but people do that every day. People used to PAY for e-mail before Hotmail and Gmail came along. Now free e-mail is standard except for corporate and people who want real support.
All three providers it's a completely hit or miss thing depending on where you live. There are businesses in the UK that google maps don't mark properly at all or they just have really poor satellite images while the others don't. But the same goes for all of them because they all get their data from different sources that prioritise differently.
That's why it would be better if more people / companies would get behind open street maps and create a definitive map data set that everyone can use.
Yeah, but what is anti-competitive behavior? If Bob's Diner offers a free order of cheese stix with a purchase of the Meatloaf Special, that's anti-competitive behavior (since they're selling the cheese stix below cost), but I don't think we want to ban that.
The reason a simple law takes 40 pages of legalese is because you want the law to stop people who damage the overall economy, not Bob's Diner. And that's why some anti-competitive behavior is only illegal when a company has monopoly power or is acting in concert with other companies.
A warning to my fellow nerds: Google and friends are going lalaland. Get your shit out of the clouds and get ready for the storm. Out.
This.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
You do realize it's not a matter of just using another search engine. If the market dominant search engine is also one of the best, switching to something that is sub-optimal isn't going to be a good choice for many. You are suggesting it's just a matter of picking another. There's a reason Google is the #1 search engine, and highly desirable for both end users and for businesses to be listed there.
You are ignoring that facet.
Its not W3C standard.
It's a candidate recommendation, which is a lot more than can be said for any of the IE6-exclusive features.
Google will soon be announcing Chrome's support for ActiveG plugins. This will make excluding Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer even easier.
Google offered Native Client to Mozilla; Mozilla didn't want it.
We've known for years now that the right way to handle platform capabilities on the web is to do feature detection on a case-by-case basis
Sure, feature detection is best when it works. But there are some cases where it doesn't solve everything.
JavaScript feature detection performed after the page has already loaded doesn't tell the server how much text will fit above the fold on the user agent's screen. Perhaps you want to send more detail (such as a large photo, a headline, and the first sentence of the article) on large screen browsers and less detail (such as a small photo and a headline) on browsers with much smaller screens. Just setting the extra information to display: none in the CSS isn't enough, because the carrier still bills the user by the bit for downloading the markup for the elements that end up not displayed.
There was also a case where different browsers would implement APIs related to scroll and mouse position by returning the position relative to different things (the window, or the top of the document, or something else), and simple present/absent feature detection wasn't enough to distinguish among these differences.
Finally, how should a web application gracefully degrade when feature detection discovers that an essential feature is not present? For example, in an application that uses WebGL, what should the application do if WebGL is not present?
Google and Microsoft fighting over phone map apps. Apple and Google fighting over the same. The HTML5 video codec patent conflict between Apple-and-Microsoft and everyone else. Maybe the real problem is that we have these tech giants, and they try to do everything in every area vaguely electronic. They aren't trying to just make and sell(/license) the best products any more: They have each created their own self-contained ecosystem, and are doing all they can to make sure that their ecosystem thrives while not in any way encouraging those of their competitors.
Maybe this wouldn't happen if we actually had an operating system company, and a phone company, and a maps company, and a web browser company, and a video technology company, and a company store, and so on. Sure, it would mean more of a headache to get all this tech to play nice together - but we wouldn't end up in these ridiculous situations where your phone refuses to talk to your favorite mapping service because that service is run by a competitors of the company that programmed the phone.
If google is the best search then why would you want to switch to a different one?
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
Remember Microsoft telling the world they had no obligation to support a competitor's product?
On the surface, there are *minor* visual similarities. Having used both I'm fairly comfortable saying that RIM didn't draw inspiration from MS here. It actually is an evolution of what they had in their playbook OS - released almost 2 years ago now.
and the first sentence of the article
Use JS to measure the client area and make an Ajax request for the image once you know the size?
For one thing, it isn't just images; it's also the amount of text that you want to download and display, and that's part of the markup that the server has to finish sending before the JavaScript has a chance to make additional requests. It's also which web browser's prefixed CSS properties you want to download and use (-moz-this, -o-that, -webkit-this, -ms-that); doesn't adding more CSS after the page loads create a FOUC (flash of unstyled content)? For another, it fails if the script fails to load, whether through noscript-style policy on the client or through a transparent corporate "Internet security appliance" proxy.
Show an error message and refuse to run. The point is that it should show the message when the browser says that it can't do it
Recently, someone complained when a WebGL application wouldn't run on Chrome for Android or Safari for iOS: "I don't think these guys are very bright if they're creating new web content that doesn't support 500+ million devices out there, and putting a message asking users to ask Google and Apple to support some obscure webgl thing furthers my belief that these guys are morons."
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/23/13219/110
You must get educated before you are capable of judging how evil either company might be.
And, don't miss the AARD code, either:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/11/05/how_ms_played_the_incompatibility/
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
Actually, yes. The HTML5 Geolocation interface is indeed supported by IE10.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
> Windows Phone explicity avoided any sort of skeumophism in its design
Bollocks. I see at least 4 skeumorphic icons in the screenshot here:
http://cdn.slashgear.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/Windows-Phone-Summit-2012-slashgear_s-Photos.jpg
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
IE 10 has Do Not Track enabled by default, Google don't want do not track, but simultaneously don't want to look like they're violating it, so they blocked IE 10 on phones, not a shocker.
Fool me once, shame on you... I bought a Windows Phone 7 device last April and have been nothing but happy with the OS itself. However, I've been nothing but pissed off and mad at the decisions Microsoft has made about it. They shouldn't have let manufacturers make these nice, expensive "flagship" devices three months before Microsoft announce no further updates would be made. Or the elusive 7.8 update that's been full of questions and ambiguity. Now, we don't even get the crappy web based Google Maps website access because we didn't get IE 10.
wtf are you talking about? The design of an icon referring to what it does is much different than designing something to be used the way the actual physical THING works.
Yes, I used xeyes.
That is not a live tile. When you clicked xeyes, it didn't launch a program. xeyes didn't tell you anything (the weather, sports scores, etc.), other than the direction the mouse pointer was relative to the xeyes.
Windowmaker dockapps did this well over a decade ago.
If the market dominant search engine is also one of the best, switching to something that is sub-optimal isn't going to be a good choice for many.
I suppose they should've thought of that before buying a Windows device then, hmm?
You know, Microsoft, the company which has been doing this with every single product they've made, ever.
(Apple has become very good about mimicking Microsoft in this regard in recent years, I might add.)
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
So, they basically try to attack their competition by pulling a major service from it and making it look bad and then they hand out a free maps app to Apple, which was on the verge of total user rage meltdown over Apple's maps application. Yeah, that makes sense.
Way to miss the point. Live Tiles and Active Frames are completely different -- they're only superficially similar. (They only look like they could be the same thing if you've only seen a couple screenshots.)
It's pretty obvious that active frames are an evolution (more of an adaptation for smaller screens) of what we've already seen on the PlayBook, which was definitely not inspired by Windows Phone. (WebOS, no question. But from what we've seen of BB10 so far, they're long past that stage.)
But go ahead and stick your head in the sand. It's better than where I suspect you've been keeping it...
Required reading for internet skeptics
I'm talking about the skeumorphic icons in the MS interface which apparently you're too thick to recognise.
It always gives me pleasure to see people who gush with positive things to say about Microsoft products demonstrate how interminably dumb they are.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
This is the funny part. MS wants everyone to use its services so bad that it's ranting and screaming about Google's "monopoly." However when Google actually stops users from using a Google service (thus forcing users to use MS's offerings) they call foul. Come on Mr. Balmer. Make up your mind!
I want this account deleted.
What a great waste of time by Google doing it in the first place, slasdot reporting it and me commenting on it.
First of all, widgets are not live tiles. Widgets are interactive components, Live Tiles are passive.
So widgets such as facebook feed, twitter feed, email notification counts, flickr feeds to name a few are not live updated via push notifications? I consider them both live and interactive components.
Weather widgets aren't updated via push notifications unless it involves an alert of some sort but they are as live as they can be. I'm sure the weather tiles on the W8 phone work the same way.