Microsoft's Virtual Earth for IE only now

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kolchakkolchak
Posted:
in General Discussion edited January 2014
Bastards at MS did it again. Their Virtual Earth at local.live.com never worked in Safari or Firefox, but at least it used to work in Camino and Mozilla. But trying it recently after a couple of months away, I couldn't get anything anymore on either browser. Instead, I get an immediate redirect to intl.local.live.com (a beta, no less), with a couple of search fields and nothing else. I thought nothing of it until I decided to check on the site using IE 6 on Windows. Lo and behold, no redirect and the site works just fine. Typical MS crap. Get people interested then switch to IE-only coding. Which means those Mac users without a PC and not using Parallels or Bootcamp are SOL, because IE 5 on the Mac is too outdated, so no Mac browser will work with it.

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 7
    chuckerchucker Posts: 5,089member
    Erm, Windows Live Local works fine here in Firefox.
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  • Reply 2 of 7
    kolchakkolchak Posts: 1,398member
    I've tried everything. The only Firefox extension I have installed is Adblock. Even turning that off doesn't help. Everything else is turned on -- Javascript, Java, load images, etc. The map view shows me a blank tan div. Aerial and birds eye views show a black div. I've upgraded from FF 1.5.0.3 to 1.5.0.7. MS's code must be horrible if it's so easy to break. I haven't done anything to Camino or Mozilla in the past few months since the last time they worked, so MS must have changed the code. Have you tried the other browsers? Opera, Camino, Mozilla and Safari all fail for me. I double-checked everything in all three, deleted all cookies, made sure JS and Java are enabled. I'm still being instantly booted to intl.local.live.com in all those browsers.
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  • Reply 3 of 7
    132ghz,4tb ddr8 sdram,95tb hdd132ghz,4tb ddr8 sdram,95tb hdd Posts: 126member
    Im going for a 'trip' to MS HQ.

    Whos with me ? (It is recommended you bring something with you along the lines of Semtex)
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  • Reply 4 of 7
    shetlineshetline Posts: 4,695member
    I just tried this using Firefox 1.5.0.7 on my Quad G5 running OS 10.4.7 -- and it works fine. I was able to switch from road view to aerial view, and successfully panned around and zoomed in on my house.
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  • Reply 5 of 7
    vineavinea Posts: 5,585member
    Oddly between Google and Microsoft it is Microsoft that is the nicer of the two services. MS allows third party use of their imagery and maps (like say NASA World Wind). Google requires that you use Google Earth only.



    Vinea
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  • Reply 6 of 7
    kolchakkolchak Posts: 1,398member
    Aha! I knew it! With the new release of Firefox 2.0, I decided to try it again. Still no dice. So I Googled for problems with Firefox and VE. Lots of results from the last couple of months saying exactly what I did about being redirected, not only on Macs but on Linux. Looks like a browser-sniffing problem on Microsoft's end. See for instance, this posting.



    What is it about the forums here nowadays? Post a problem and instead of people offering advice or trying to figure out the cause, all you get is "well, it works great for me so it must be working for every other Mac in the world. You must be insane, ridiculously stupid, a hopelessly incompetent noob or all of the above, and therefore not worthy of my attention," although in not so many words. Whatever happened to the good, old days when Mac users actually tried to help each other?
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  • Reply 7 of 7
    bastionbastion Posts: 16member
    There's a Virtual Earth Widget. Only trouble is it's quite small.



    Google requires that you use Google Earth only. - Isn't Google Maps the same as Google Earth without the temperamental interface?



    Personally I'm not that keen on Google Earth. Everywhere I zoom in on seems to have low res and often clouds over the detail - check out Northern Ireland or Rome for example.
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