Konqueror and Google Maps
After I did my “Kiosk” upgrade to KDE 3.5.2 I was really interested to see if Konqueror would finally work with Google Maps, of course, the problem isn’t with Konqueror it’s with the browser detection. Konqueror uses something called khtml to render web pages. It’s really a fairly good/standards compliant ACID test passing engine. So much so that Apple thought they would base Safari on it. The problem is that some websites recognize “Safari” in the User agent and say, “sorry, we don’t support you” if the browser user agent claims Konqueror….
Some of Googles services are that way… so… this discussion on the dot at kde… and this slashdot discussion on the release of konqueror 3.5 essentially laid it out.
Change the user agent for the maps.google.com or local.google.com site to Safari.
How to do this?
In konqueror…. Tools menu… “Change browser identification”, click the button labeled “NEW”, “When Browsing the Following site:” I entered google.com (may as well go ahead and hit all their services as safari….) “Use the following identification”…. Scroll all the way down to “Safari 1.2.4 on Mac OS X”. Then Click OK and then click OK again. Google maps now works.
Additionally, you could email google and tell them to fix things, but… you’ll likely get a form letter back asking you to use a supported browser… blah blah blah…. Maybe at some point they’ll realize that Konqueror IS a supported browser for SOME of their services even though they didn’t realize it.
I still can’t seem to get the Google Notebook Fullpage to work correctly…. I may have to try another User Agent, or it may be another issue…..