Matt Goyer’s Real Estate Blog

We’ve had a few people hit a weird bug with Virtual Earth and FF3:

I can’t move around in the embedded Virtual Earth map with Firefox 3 and the new Redfin release. When I click and try to drag the map, the map momentarily blacks out and then reappears, but zoomed in and offset in a direction and distance that is unrelated to what I did with the mouse.

A Microsoft blogger has more on the bug plus a work around,
Firefox 3 .pageX / .pageY bug.

Last week Microsoft released a new version of Virtual Earth (v6.1).

It’s great to see some of the following features:

• Bird’s Eye Hybrid View: It’s easy to get disoriented in Bird’s Eye. Seeing the street names will really help.
• Walking directions and traffic-based routing: Walking directions will be good for urbanites who want to measure the distance from a listing to work and traffic will be good fro suburbanites.
• Improved Safari Support: While introduced in v6.0 sounds like they fixed some bugs. Since re-enabling Safari support for our map our Safari traffic has almost doubled.
• Improved Printing Support: Lots of folks print out our maps and details pages when touring homes and we definitely have some bugs. Hopefully when we switch over to v6.1 we can kill those bugs.

I am less excited about their focus on improving 3D tours. I’d much rather see the team focus on adding street level imagery (more than later though). We’d also like to see a mobile version of the SDK and we are always looking for performance improvements (though it sounds like they improved the performance of panning.)

So when are going to move to VE 6.1? I’d expect us to switch in about a month and half. We do have a release going out sooner but to feel comfortable with a new version of VE we like to do a test pass with it on all our supported browsers and we already did the test pass for this earlier release.

Trulia Hindsight is a pretty neat method of visually building trends.

What I wonder about is why they used Microsoft’s Virtual Earth for Hindsight and yet use Google Maps for their main search site. Anyone know?

We’ve certainly debated the merits of each but our conclusions are likely biased since we’ve only done a really deep dive on Virtual Earth. It would be great to hear how they feel after implementing sites with both.

Wow, Apple announced today at WWDC 2007 that Safari 3 is coming to Windows. This is an interesting move in so much that it will force developers to take the Safari browser that much more seriously given its potential increased reach.

Previously it was too easy for developers large and small to say that Safari is only 5% of customers let’s just ignore those 5% instead of supporting them. For us, we didn’t want to ignore them because 5% of your user base at a startup is very important but we had to because of some partner choices we made.The good news is that both of our partners who do not support Safari already had plans to support Safari before this announcement.

The other thing I really like about this announcement is that Apple is really boastful about their JavaScript performance. From Engadget’s Steve Jobs live from WWDC 2007:

I would love to see the other browser’s step up and start to compete not just on features but on performance. There is only so much we can do as app developers to make our apps speedy.

If you want to try out Safari 3 with Redfin you will need to make us think it is Firefox. Go to the debug menu and change your user agent to be Firefox 2.0.0.2. To enable the debug menu on Windows you need to (thanks to our Mac dev Sasha for digging into Windows for this tip :) ):

1. Open up %APPDATA%\Apple Computer\Safar\Preferences.plist in Notepad.
2. Add the following entry at the bottom of the file, right before the </dict> line:
   <key>IncludeDebugMenu</key>
   <integer>1</integer>

3. Restart Safari.

Please note that while it sort of works there are some quirks.

Update: Redfin now supports Safari 3. Yay!

Yesterday the Microsoft Virtual Earth team released a new version of Local.live.com and a new version of their API. What is most exciting for us is that Microsoft started to compress with GZIP the v4 version of the map control which is the one we use on the Redfin site. This means that the Microsoft map control went from 435KB to 103KB; a big savings for users visiting our map page for the first time or for users whose map control needs to be re-downloaded (approximately once every 48 hours according to the caching rules set by Microsoft.)

As a reference the Google control is 54KB compressed.