4 ms·

At least that's not just because of a user agent string. Firefox doesn't support Native Client, and Google hasn't finished rewriting Earth in WASM yet: https:/

At least that's not just because of a user agent string. Firefox doesn't support Native Client, and Google hasn't finished rewriting Earth in WASM yet: https://medium.com/google-earth/earth-on-web-the-road-to-cross-browser-7338e0f46278 https://medium.com/google-earth/earth-on-web-the-road-to-cro...

BHSPitMonkey 9y ago
Google does not just do this for Maps. Observe how different a Google Search results page looks on Chrome vs Firefox on Android: https://imgur.com/a/A8TYQ https://imgur.com/a/A8TYQ I'm sure some will say they're more happy with the simpler interface, but the fact still remains that they're serving a lower quality version of the site (with no access to things like Search Tools to filter by date, for example) to non-Chrome users.
kuschku 9y ago
At the time, asm.js was the standard for high-performance web applications, and Google decided to go with a format only they used, with no backwards compatibility to any other browser, ignoring the back then WIP WebAssembly. And despite using a simple compiler backend to compile their native code to NaCl that also allows support for asm.js and WASM in a matter of a few days (entire game engines have been ported that way), Google has been going for months and still kept it Chrome-only.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  Did you read the article I linked? It explains why they went with NaCL over ASM, and why, despite them having a WASM prototype for months now, it's not ready for production yet. Basically: native threading. NaCL supports it, ASM and WASM don't (yet).
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Then don’t release it. This isn’t the first time Google has released a product exclusively for Chrome, trying to pull more users to their own platform. Even if this is not directly intended, the result is a massive anticompetitive effect.

4 ms·

At least that's not just because of a user agent string. Firefox doesn't support Native Client, and Google hasn't finished rewriting Earth in WASM yet: https:/

by Ajedi32 9y ago

BHSPitMonkey 9y ago
Google does not just do this for Maps. Observe how different a Google Search results page looks on Chrome vs Firefox on Android: https://imgur.com/a/A8TYQ https://imgur.com/a/A8TYQ I'm sure some will say they're more happy with the simpler interface, but the fact still remains that they're serving a lower quality version of the site (with no access to things like Search Tools to filter by date, for example) to non-Chrome users.
kuschku 9y ago
At the time, asm.js was the standard for high-performance web applications, and Google decided to go with a format only they used, with no backwards compatibility to any other browser, ignoring the back then WIP WebAssembly. And despite using a simple compiler backend to compile their native code to NaCl that also allows support for asm.js and WASM in a matter of a few days (entire game engines have been ported that way), Google has been going for months and still kept it Chrome-only.
- Ajedi32 9y ago
  Did you read the article I linked? It explains why they went with NaCL over ASM, and why, despite them having a WASM prototype for months now, it's not ready for production yet. Basically: native threading. NaCL supports it, ASM and WASM don't (yet).
  - kuschku 9y ago
    Then don’t release it. This isn’t the first time Google has released a product exclusively for Chrome, trying to pull more users to their own platform. Even if this is not directly intended, the result is a massive anticompetitive effect.