Google Maps Zoom Control missing in Internet Explorer (IE): a solution

When I was working on rebuilding daft.ie’s mapping system for the modern web, it involved writing alot of Javascript (JS) code and loading this via a couple of JS source files, one external one from Google (i.e. the core Google Maps JS) and another from our own web-servers.

It all worked fine in most browsers, except of course Internet Explorer (IE). To be fair, IE8 was fine; however, seemingly at random, the zoom control would sometimes not appear on the map for IE7 and IE6 and you’d get one of IE’s very unhelpful error messages. At Daft we like to ensure that the site is available and consistent on all browsers, so it was imperative to get this issue sorted.

Because of the aforementioned unhelpful error messages, it proved to be a very difficult bug to nail down. I began to suspect that it was due to the code from Google loading after the map is set-up in the daft.ie hosted file, i.e. IE was calling Google-specific functions before it had the code. As it was all wrapped in a jQuery $(document).ready I didn’t think this could happen, but turns out that in the older versions of IE it could! I tried moving the JS around, loading the Daft-specific JS as late as possible, to try and give the Google JS the maximum amount of time to load, but that was to no avail.

So, I needed to find a way to load the Daft JS when I was 100% certain the Google JS had arrived. After various futile attempts, the solution ended up being pretty simple – change my

to

That way, the bulk of my JS is only executed once everything else has loaded and sure enough, the issue disappeared!