> The transitions seem really smooth and the user experience is pleasant... until I open them on an Android device that came out just 2 years ago (one of those rugged models), in Firefox.
My daily driver is a Samsung Galaxy S4 (2014) with LineageOS and Firefox (Fennec F-Droid, no google services).
Your link works pretty well, it took a few seconds to load the map, but zooming and panning is quite smooth, it seems.
Edit: panning is much less smooth on openstreetmap. It's faster to bring in new features when zooming, but you have to endure blurry text and less details for half a second or so. Also, you can't rotate the view. IIRC google maps renders text locally to solve that.
> Your link works pretty well, it took a few seconds to load the map, but zooming and panning is quite smooth, it seems.
This is exactly why I recorded a video and put one in that blog post - because sometimes people that are running even the same software will have vastly different experiences. At the end of the day "But it works/doesn't work on my machine." is just the reality that we need to deal with - which will vary for someone with a weaker or more powerful device, certain browser, certain drivers and so on.
> Panning is much less smooth on openstreetmap.
I'd say that from the best to worst for me it'd go a bit like this: Google Maps (application) > OpenStreetMap (web) > Google Maps (web) > MapLibre GL JS (web)
> It's faster to bring in new features when zooming, but you have to endure blurry text and less details for half a second or so.
Same here!
> Also, you can't rotate the view.
I can't rotate the view in Google Maps (web) either, only in the native app.
For me, the web maps also seem to use raster tiles, whereas the application seems to use vector data, added more info in another comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33712150
My daily driver is a Samsung Galaxy S4 (2014) with LineageOS and Firefox (Fennec F-Droid, no google services).
Your link works pretty well, it took a few seconds to load the map, but zooming and panning is quite smooth, it seems.
Edit: panning is much less smooth on openstreetmap. It's faster to bring in new features when zooming, but you have to endure blurry text and less details for half a second or so. Also, you can't rotate the view. IIRC google maps renders text locally to solve that.