Google Maps Web Version Returns for Windows Phone

Windows Phone users lack of access to the Google site came to light late last week. Google officials said that they had always disabled access to the Google Maps site for Windows Phone users. A number of Windows Phone users disagreed and said they believed Google began redirecting them more recently to the generic Google site when they tried to access maps. Google officials initially said that the Google Maps site wasn't working for Windows Phone users because the Internet Explorer versions that are part of Windows Phone don't use the Webkit rendering engine.

This argument didn't hold water given that Internet Explorer on Windows 7, Windows 8 and Windows RT uses the same Microsoft "Trident" rendering engine as IE on Windows Phone does - yet users on Windows were able to get to the Google Maps Web site with no problem. Over the weekend, Google officials said that unspecified "recent improvements to IE mobile and Google Maps" had led Google to work on restoring access to the Google Maps site for Windows Phone users.