[promiseofbeans]

I'm impressed with how well they've enforced that as well. I tried spoofing my UA to be safari (which I fully expected to not work), but it also didn't accept when I set my UA to Chrome.

What's especially odd is that Apple acknowledges Firefox's existence in their WWDC videos about web features, when they mention browser compatibility or who they're working with.

[cornedor]

Works fine here with a Chrome User-Agent in Firefox

https://imgur.com/LtS3jXD

[JosephRedfern]

I thought the same, until I realised I still had `/unsupported` in the URL. Spoofing a Chrome UA and dropping that path from the URL let me load (and use) Apple Maps fine under Firefox.

[freehorse]

It works fine on firefox with a safari UA; but not if I turn the resist fingerprinting setting on. Maybe that is your issue too?

[dewey]

To be fair, it’s a beta version and browser compatibility could be something for the launch.

I’m a disappointed Firefox user but I also know what Beta means.

[ho_schi]

You cannot fix bugs if you don’t collect them. Neither Mozilla. If you have not enough resources, just collect and track. Fix them when more people are available.

Same for native application ports, ship them as early as possible. Just mark them beta or alpha. At least you collect bugs. Bonus, you filter which are generic issues and which are platform dependent issues.

[arcticbull]

You don't have to get them from users by giving them a bad experience, though. You can get them in-house.

[ho_schi]

If it is in such immature condition it should be kept internal.

If it doesn’t work at all in a web-browser which handles HTML5 and modern CS it is probably not a website - but a proprietary protocol which needs a special client-application.

[lucideer]

> browser compatibility could be something for the launch

This is indeed how many bad/junior engineers approach this issue but it's backward - anyone with any experience doing launch QA knows well that browser compat needs to be built in from Day 1 - retrofitting it is disastrously expensive from a launch-delays perspective.

[troupo]

> it’s a beta version and browser compatibility could be something for the launch.

It's extremely hard to retrofit compatibility onto products. Case in point: all the "we only work in Chrome" sites that use Chrome-only APIs.

[randomdata]

Like others have pointed out, it seems to work fine in other browsers once you trick it into letting you in. General compatibility doesn't seem to be an issue. So, what is it that Firefox and Chrome on Linux (and only on Linux) don't support?

H.265 is what they don't support. I'm not an avid enough user to know where Apple Maps makes use of media, but the source code contains media player controls, so it must somewhere. Retrofitting compatibility by launch may be as simple as re-encoding the H.265 content. Not at all worth the effort for beta 1, but with an obvious path forward.

[vladvasiliu]

> So, what is it that Firefox and Chrome on Linux (and only on Linux) don't support? H.265 is what they don't support.

Do codecs need to be supported by the browser itself? I thought this was unloaded to some media decoding framework. Linux does have h.265 support at least in mpv.

[randomdata]

> Do codecs need to be supported by the browser itself?

Not necessarily. The browser could defer to licensing established by the operating system vendor, but Firefox places the expectation upon itself to have parity across platforms and to not support encumbered technologies.

> Linux does have h.265 support at least in mpv.

And if you've negotiated the licensing fees you can even use it, but chances are... Microsoft and Apple have dealt with the licensing for you on their platforms, so the ballgame is different there.

[ralfd]

They to promise addtional browser support though:

> To start, Maps on the web is available only in English. Maps on the web will be available for additional browsers, platforms, and languages soon. Published Date: July 24, 2024