Virtual Earth Maps on Safari for MAC

Virtual Earth Maps on Safari for MAC

• scyle

  While we're talking browser support, or lack of, would it be possible to support SeaMonkey It shouldn't be too difficult to support SeaMonkey, as it is based upon the same Gecko code base as Firefox is based upon. In fact, after spoofing my User Agent string from SeaMonkey to Firefox, Virtual Earth works perfectly in SeaMonkey. To me, it looks like the Virtual Earth site is simply blocking out any User Agent strings that don't have "Firefox" or "MSIE" in them. That's not right, IMHO.
  
  Thanks.
  
  

• RizwanSharp

  Hey gobears,
  Any chance you want to share the changes you made back to other developers You may even be able to help MS out . It maybe a good move for you also as things are bound to change in the next version of VE but if people know the issues maybe they can be fixed
  John.
  
  
  

• leo1

  I don't know what you're using for your statistics, but no website I've ever been involved with has had 97% of its users on the latest version of FF and IE.
  
  I don't think its disingenuous at all to say that Microsoft refuses to make VE cross-platform compatible. If you wanted to, you certainly have the resources to make VE work on most of the browsers that are currently in use. I spent about a day modifying the mapcontrol.js and managed to get VE to work on Safari, Netscape, Firefox (even 1.0), IE, and Opera with many of the earlier versions of those browsers working.
  
  There are really simple well-documented cross-platform coding techniques that MS flat out ignored. For example, most people use the following technique for event handling to cope with the fact that IE doesn't follow the W3 standard:
  
  function attachEvent(obj, event, method) {
  if(obj.addEventListener) {
  obj.addEventListener(event, method, false);
  } else if(obj.attachEvent) {
  obj.attachEvent("on" + event, method);
  }
  }
  
  
  Yet MS still simply uses obj.attachEvent throughout their code. That's what 5 lines, and that right there deals with probably 75% of the compatibility issues with VE.
  
  So, yes, MS *REFUSES* to make VE cross-platform compatible. If MS would like help modifying their code to follow the relevant standards and cross-platform coding techniques I would be happy to help.
  
  

• Ted.

  SeaMonkey lol, arn't they those little things you grow from a packet as a child
  Don't get too upset with Caleb about browser support, the fact that VE supports the Fox is pretty cool. MS is putting some effort into cross browser compatibility, look at what they are doing with Atlas.
  What is very useful are those little snippets like the one from gobears. If it does solve 75% of your problems maybe MS will impliment them. Let them know what you need changed rather then complaining. Not many companies go and support other competitors systems remember.
  John.
  
  
  

• Anton Walker

  I found this example, it worked great for me. The instructions are in the readme and the code is in the zip file

  https://code.poly9.com/trac/browser/vev4_saf

  
  

• arcliner

  If you turn on debugging in Safari and spend about an hour modifying the Virtual Earth mapcontrol.js file you can get Virtual Earth to work in most browsers, including Safari on Mac. It is really amazing to me that Microsoft refuses to make Virtual Earth cross-platform compatible. They use non-standard IE-specific JavaScript unnecessarily throughout their code.
  
  

• samardjiev

  That is really interesting.

  From the readme it sounds like they have feed it back to MS to impliment in a future version of VE.

  The headache of course is I will have to buy a Mac to properly test it in the future.....

  John.

  
  
  

• Shippa

  VE doesn't suuport Safari for Mac. If you load the latest FF browser, you'll be all set.

  Officially, we support the latest IE build (IE6 with latest hotfixes and IE7 RC1), and FF 1.5.0.6 (the latest for both PC and Mac).

  
  

• Bill26

  While I agree it would be nice if we supported Safari, it's a bit disingenuous to say we "refuse to make VE cross-platform compatibile", given that we support the largest non-MSFT IE browser out there, for both PC and Mac platforms. As with any other Web site, we need to focus our efforts where they will have the biggest impact. Given that IE and FF combine make up approximately 97% of the Web users out there, and FF is the largest of the non-IE browsers, I think we've done a pretty good job of reaching non-MS users.

  Again, I agree it would be nice if we supported Safari, Opera, Konqueror, etc. (the remaining 3% of Web users we don't support) but, hey, we're still young.

  
  

• errolian

  Atlas is a complete and total hack to try and implement non-standard Microsoft cruft in the Firefox DOM. You can easily get VE to work on Firefox without Atlas.
  
  Microsoft is not selling an Internet Explorer add-on, they are selling a mapping product.
  
  And once again, Microsoft could very easily support most, if not all, of the browsers currently in use by spending a couple hours modifying their code. The don't need my help. They simply need to make the decision to support other browsers. They have obviously made a *conscious* decision to code VE specifically for IE and ignore other browsers completely. Their arrogance is astounding.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Virtual Earth Maps on Safari for MAC