A Virtual Earth Safari can be a Bumpy Ride

As part of a redesign of their real estate Web site, German immobilienscout24.de have added interactive maps based on Microsoft's Virtual Earth technology. Unfortunately, though, Safari users don't seem to be welcome to navigate those maps just yet. Question is, why?

When bringing up a map view page, what you'll see is this dialog box, stating: "Currently, our map view is not compatible with your browser. Please try using a different browser. Thank you for your understanding." After dismissing the dialog box, the plug-in will keep showing a "Just a moment. Loading plug-in..." message, and that's it. No map.

Well, people using a computing platform as "uncommon" as a Mac and a browser with a rendering engine as "exotic" as WebKit do run into such problems every now and then. What was special in this case was that I remembered seeing this map view while the site's redesign was in "public beta sneak preview" state, and said map view worked just fine back then.

It's not compatible. Or is it?

Since that dialog box suggested using a different browser, I told Safari to "be" that other browser, courtesy of its Debug menu's User Agent settings. And, what do you know, we're back in business: when Safari impersonates Firefox, the Virtual Earth plug in works like a charm, including all overlays provided by the page. (On a side note, if you haven't seen this yet, try out the 3D view when you come across a Virtual Earth map. It's really impressive!)

For other non-"Safari" user agent options like Mozilla or Netscape, though, the plug-in will simply fail silently. Which means -- quite a bit to my surprise, I have to admit -- that showing the error dialog specifically for Safari users is actually a courtesy, and not some arbitrary annoyance. The code that this page uses to bring up that dialog, by the way, looks like this:

if(navigator.userAgent.indexOf("Safari") != -1) {
    alert ([...]);
}

Note that this displays the dialog box only. Hence, the reason that the Virtual Earth plug-in fails must lie elsewhere.

According to Virtual Earth's system requirements, this technology supports Internet Explorer on Windows, and Firefox on Windows and Macs, but the FAQ also claims that Safari 2 is supported, as well (as of this writing, it's the 9th question from the top). So what is going on here?

If it works, why shouldn't it?

When asked why the map feature was not supported for Safari, all I heard back from the immobilienscout24.de support guys was that "Safari will also support the maps again soon. [Shouldn't that be the other way round?] This feature is planned for the current quarter."

Obviously, it's good news that they work on officially supporting this, but it still does not answer the "why": why does the plug-in fail to load, although, technically, it works just fine?

Are you aware of any other websites that use Microsoft's Virtual Earth map view? If so, have you run into similar problems while using Safari to view these pages?

Update (2008-02-07) When I checked back today, the map on immobilienscout24.de was working just fine. Apparently, all that is needed to make the Virtual Earth plugin work with Safari 3 is this:

<script>
// Workaround for Safari support
VEValidator.ValidateFloat = function(float) {
    return true;
}
</script>

The WebKit Bugzilla database also addresses this issue. with the most recent comment on this "bug" being: "Since spoofing as Firefox 2 works in Safari 3, this is an evangelism issue." How diplomatic a way to phrase this...