In Comments on Thursday's Playing with Google Maps post, a reader writes,

Your article "Playing with Google Maps", published online at KVUE.com, asserts that "If you're a Mac user, Google Maps does not work with Safari." Sorry, that's wrong. Google Maps works just fine with both Safari and FireFox on Macs (though for some reason FireFox doesn't display the map image behind your beach icons). What Google Maps does not support is the very fine OmniWeb browser.

There are a lot of variables here. In addition to this reader's observations, the Journal's Macs don't see the icons (a Mac user here was the source of the possibly erroneous "Google Maps doesn't work with Macs" -- if it doesn't work with your Mac, you're not entirely wrong); my Firefox sees some of the icons, not all -- still loading after a half-hour -- and those I zoom in on have an extra outline (at right). The icons fill in from the bottom of the list and get stuck; some are just black-bordered rectangles, the ghost of an icon.

I fired up an old I.E. 6.0 that came with my computer, and some of the icons show, with shadows as at left. Some display just the shadow, skipping the icon (the screen grab at right).

There may be other things going on with the gmaptrak hack (a work in progress), with the icons (which are in png format), or with the sheer number of them on this map.

Would you help me test this?

Browse to Greater Rhode Island beaches and see if you can see the icons in the list at right, in the map, and in a zoomed section of the map.

Pop a comment in below, or dash off a quick email, telling me what browser you use, on a Mac or a PC, and what you see. Do all the icons fill in? Do they have shadows when zoomed, rectangular "frames"?

Thanks!

(And long-overdue thanks to David Real at Belo in Dallas, who has reformatted all my blog posts for several years now and sent them all over the country. Without him, Mr. Zimmerman would never have seen this post, or had a chance to have his say.)