Yesterday we reported the difficulties Windows Phone users were facing in connecting to the Google Maps HTML5 app through maps.google.com on the IE mobile browser. Google has acknowledged this issue and claim it is as a result of IE 9 on Windows Phone 7 and Windows Phone 7.5 not having the required HTML5 support to run their Maps app. They have however confirmed that IE 10 on Windows Phone 8 is capable of running their Maps app and that access will soon be restored.
Windows Phone 8 and IE 10 have been around for over two months now, and its surprising that Google has taken so long to change their redirect policy for IE mobile.
In our last test, IE mobile still did not offer a good maps experience with no ability to pan or zoom and perform basic map functionality. As a result, we chose to continue to redirect IE mobile users to Google.com where they could at least make local searches. The Firefox mobile browser did offer a somewhat better user experience and that’s why there is no redirect for those users.While this indicates that the redirection may not have been done with malicious intentions we wont be surprised if there was some motive behind leaving users without access to Google services on Microsoft’s newest platforms. If the media hadn't shifted everyone’s attention to the redirection, we don’t know how long it would have taken for Google to act and let alone acknowledge this issue.
Recent improvements to IE mobile and Google Maps now deliver a better experience and we are currently working to remove the redirect. We will continue to test Google Maps compatibility with other mobile browsers to ensure the best possible experience for users.
One may argue that Microsoft’s platform hasn’t grown significantly enough for Google to focus their resources to build apps on it. However we feel that big companies like Google should at least work closely to give their users a good experience irrelevant of the platform they choose to use.
Now we have to wonder how this will affect Windows Phone 7 users who will not be upgraded to IE 10 even when Microsoft released Windows Phone 7.8. I hope Microsoft uses this as an indicator to stop fragmenting their platform and release Windows Phone 8 universally for all Windows Phones.
source – The Next Web