Mark's Notebook


	And this is the simple truth - that to live is to feel oneself lost. He who accepts it has already begun to find himself, to be on firm ground. Instinctively, as do the shipwrecked, he will look around for something to which to cling, and that tragic, ruthless glance, absolutely sincere, because it is a question of his salvation, will cause him to bring order to the chaos of his life. These are the only genuine ideas; the ideas of the shipwrecked. All the rest is rhetoric, posturing, farce. - Soren Kierkegaard

MSN Maps

Thursday 12 January 2006, 3:43 pm
Keywords:

MSN Local Live Maps (http://local.live.com/) may "blow Google out of the water," but they don't run on Apple's Safari browser. Why would that be?

I've tested on the following other browsers where the page does not work properly:

IE 5.2.3 Mac (!!!)
OmniWeb 5.12 Mac

and the following pages that work properly:

Firefox 1.5 Mac (works but generates 17 Javascript errors)
Opera 8.5 Mac (works no matter how I have the browser identify)
Camino 0.85 Mac
Mozilla 1.7.8 Mac
Netscape 7.2 Mac

A cursory examination shows that the page uses JScript instead of JavaScript. That's to be expected, I guess. There is also a line of code that checks whether the browser is IE. But it doesn't appear to lock out other browsers. I had Opera identify as Opera, as Mozilla, and as IE, and it worked no matter which identity I chose.

I'd like to add these maps to the arsenal at www.mixed-up.com/maps.

FWIW, the maps are only so-so, but the aerial views are wonderful!

Mark's Notebook

MSN Maps

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