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.

This has annoyed me all day. First they renew the “economic agreement” with Mozilla until 2011, and now they’re going to release their own browser. What?

Don’t they have shareholders who have a big stake ($463 right now) to gratify? That’s like Microsoft hiring Linus Torvalds to work on the Linux kernel. How do you get away with something like that? Is Google so rich that it is paying people to compete with it?

Actually, that last one is kind of funny.

This makes so little sense to me that I have to think of outrageous reasons for the announcement :

1. Starting with the least outrageous reason : Google is actually trying to expand competition in the web browser/mobile space. Though, I thought that IE/Opera/Firefox/Safari was a good mix. This isn’t gas stations we’re talking about. Competition for browser market share extends far beyond these four browsers.
2. They legalized mind altering drugs in Mountain View. (Mythical mushrooms in the Escape menu, Hippie crack at Slice)
3. They’re sending Mozilla a second hint that they want Mozilla to drop Gecko
4. Judging by some of the screenshots, this is another way to get more Google traffic. But come on? Your own browser?

Comments, additional conspiracies welcome.