Google Maps and geolocation

Cesar — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 05:37:34 +0000

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.

Cross browser tidbits

Cesar — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 21:25:05 +0000

for each…in doesn’t work in Opera/IE/Safari. So avoid it when creating web pages and use for loops instead. In fact, you shouldn’t even be using it in arrays. oops. (Javascript is special in this way)
While location is defined by most browsers, most let you redefine it in a local scope. Not Opera
$(‘’) may look correct in jQuery, but it will not work properly in IE. You must close the element tag. So it is $(‘’)

Softcore software development » browser compatibility

Google Maps and geolocation

Cross browser tidbits