xandros9
Active member
If you want to check it out, use the F12 Dev Tools to change the UA of IE to something like Chrome to see if anything's different.
^ Interesting. What UA strings, specifically for mobile browsers, did you test with besides chrome, safari and IE?
I installed User Agent Switcher add-on to desktop Chrome and checked iOS, Android, and WP7 UA's there. I also added a WP8 UA "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; MSIE 10.0; Windows Phone 8.0; Trident/6.0; IEMobile/10.0; ARM; Touch; NOKIA; Lumia 920)" there, and the end result was the same as in WP7.
I refuse to believe they are using some link that is so fancy that it works in a webkit browser and it doesn't work in IE.
Well you see, this is my point. That doesn't necessarily mean Google is singling out IE. You would have also had to test a few other non-webkit based mobile browsers, like Opera. Only if they also all worked correctly, could we start suspecting IE is being singled out for 'special treatment'.
Based on those tests, I'd suspect Google does the same thing they do on their other sites...
"this is what works with webkit, see what works for you"
I'm not saying you are wrong. You could be right. We just need be careful before going too far with accusations.
but I am also amazed at how complex their javascript must be in order for IE 11 not to support it.
<snipped>
Maybe ill download a browser that isn't IE or FireFox (FF seems to be pretty well supported by Google's sites) and see how things work.
Okay, I'll say it. This has absolutely nothing to do with the complexity of the code behind that button. In the second line I quoted, you yourself provided the real reason why this happens... you'll download another browser... maybe Chrome, or at least something based on Webkit.
Google has (or at least had - I haven't checked for a while) a few services which serve a sub-par version of their website to IE (or any other non webkit based browser), despite IE being fully capable of handling the code of their deluxe version, which they reserve for people using a browser that they control, either partially (any Webkit browser), or fully (Chrome). Although in some cases the code really is very proprietary (like Google Maps), in most cases it's just because Google wants consumers to think that all browsers except the ones they control are crippled. Then more people switch. Google cripples more. More people switch... and so on...
It's quite effective.
Finally, Google doesn't do a good job supporting FireFox. FireFox does a good job of supporting Google. The Mozilla group felt they had to mimic some of Google's proprietary features to keep their browser viable. Microsoft once chose to do the same, but their Enterprise customers demanded a standards compliant HTML renderer, so they had to backtrack.
If Google is using these shady (albeit effective) practices, then why doesn't MS do the same thing? Sure many of the popular sites are owned by Google, but the most popular OS is owned by MS. They COULD make running Chrome on a Windows machine a nightmare. I am not saying that they should (it isn't very ethical and might make them look bad in the end), but Google started it. They have given themselves an unfair advantage that was essentially stripped of MS years ago (simply because Windows came preloaded with IE).