Google Maps and geolocation

I was first made aware of the fact that maps.google.com now uses geolocation by sdwilsh, which is new in Firefox 3.5. But when I loaded maps, I was surprised to see that it didn’t work when I visited the site. And I was using something even more recent than Firefox 3.5, Minefield. Surely, it has geolocation, so what is going on?

The reason maps doesn’t support Minefield is because of *drumrolls* … browser sniffing. Developers… no wait… GOOGLE web developers, I thought we moved on?

The actual bit of code is here unminimized and tidied up ;

function isBrowserGeolocationSupported(){
    if (window.navigator &&
        navigator.userAgent.search("Firefox") != -1 &&
        navigator.geolocation)
        return true;
    if (window.navigator &&
        navigator.userAgent.search("Chrome") != -1)
        return Number(String(/Chrome\/[0-9]+/.exec(navigator.userAgent)).substr(7))>=2;
    var gearsFactory=null;

The hell? Ok, so I understand they do a bit of browser sniffing because it looks like Chrome had a old/broken implementation of geolocation. But I wish there was a more graceful way of doing this (maybe something like navigator.geolocation.version < 1). One that didn't break every application that may implement geolocation that isn't named Firefox. Because, those exist too.