Google Maps never supported IE on Windows Phone 8, and likely never will

UPDATE: A Microsoft spokesperson has responded to Google saying that:<p>"Internet Explorer in Windows Phone 8 and Windows 8 use the same rendering engine."<p>It appears that <a href="http://maps.google.com" rel="nofollow">http://maps.google.com</a> worked fine on Windows Phone until Google started blocking it. In fact it is still working on the Lumia 920 if I go to <a href="http://maps.google.co.uk" rel="nofollow">http://maps.google.co.uk</a> as it looks like they forgot to redirect that one. Are there differences between how it works on Windows Phone and on webkit based mobile browsers? To say that "Since Internet Explorer is not a WebKit browser, Windows Phone devices are not able to access Google Maps for the mobile web" is simply not true. Internet Explorer on the desktop is not a WebKit browser and it works fine with Google maps.<p>It seems as though the reason that Windows Phone can't access Google Maps is that Google decided (for reasons they would need to explain) to start blocking Windows Phone users.

Google is taking the bizarre position that only iOS and Android exist on mobile (and only the official browsers of those platforms).<p>I don't ever remember Google Maps being blocked in Konqueror or IceCat, so I'm not sure why they are using this tactic on mobile. More importantly, a lot of good-citizen webdevs work at Google like Paul Irish, must be rather awkward for those types.

And yet... you can use it to visit maps.google.co.uk [0].<p>Stop making excuses for Google. This is ridiculous ffs.<p>[0] <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z8vfzurnKw" rel="nofollow">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z8vfzurnKw</a>

Bizarre.<p>I wonder if, in 10 years, WebKit will be viewed as the next IE6 when the latest/greatest HTML rendering engine comes along?<p>What happened to standards compliance?

On the one hand, this isn't really any different than Microsoft not supporting Office on Chromium.<p>On the other hand, isn't the whole point of web standards to avoid situations like this?<p>I suspect we'll just get confirmation of something we really already know: standards are really important only when you're not the market leader.

<i>The mobile web version of Google Maps is optimized for WebKit browsers such as Chrome and Safari.</i><p>Does it work with mobile gecko?

Don't be evil, Google. Please remember it.

As a Windows Phone user in China, the feeling is very familiar. Bravo, Google, you've certainly learned a few tricks from the bloody Communists.

I imagine there's a good market for a meta-mapping app that lets the user easily switch their views from various mapping services and providers. It would essentially be a webview that kept each map open on a different tab but with a smarter custom ui and animations for switching.

IE across ALL mobile devices currently represents less than 2% market share according to NetMarketShare. In other words, less than the Blackberry browser. Would you optimize YOUR product for that?

i think the funniest thing is, it actually took this long for somebody to notice

Many Google engineers here. Anybody care to explain what are the technical reasons why this would be not supported?