in google maps if you let it calculate a route you can change it dynamically by drag and drop...

That is cool! So many times I've wanted to do that. Is the "Avoid highways" checkbox also a new feature? That's already been useful for me today...

The Drag and Drop is new since yesterday for me. That's way cool, and hugely useful. The "Avoid Highways" option has been there a few weeks now.

TonyB

Official from Google:

http://google-latlong.blogspot.com/

TonyB

Saw this on Lifehacker and decided to check it out, I've just found that Google Maps sends me along a Bridleway to get to the next town, I drag the line down to the main road and I'm sent along a very muddy track which has a concrete pipe blocking the end of it!

Over all the feature is brilliant even if the directions aren't :D

When did Google Maps get exit numbers added to highways?

http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1335/651680643_4ac388d7ed.jpg?v=0

Colin, I'm sure that's pretty new. We're getting in on Google Maps UK too. All these recent updates have made Google Maps so much more useful!

The exit number have been there for a few weeks as well as the avoid highways. This new feature is really beneficial for directing friends or family for an easier route as opposed to the quickest.

This needs a button to save to My Maps. That would really be valuable for repetitive and historical trips. I'm guessing that the segment drag came from that effort.

This is VERY nice. It's making GOogle Maps use MUCH more user-friendly. I'm anxious to show this one around....

I have noticed that when you search for directions, Google Maps doesn't give you the fastest way or the shortest way!

Now what Firefox needs is a per-site configuration for its config, so I can enable right click capturing for Google Maps only. No way I am going to turn it on permanently. And switching the setting around is annoying.

Exactly what I have been asking for since maps came out. Wonderful!

uhhhh ohhh...... found a bug :)

I dropped a stop point on a highway where there is an overpass but no off ramp, and since it just calculates a new route, the second trip started on the road that there was no way to get to.....

Ohh well... these things should get ironed out eventually.

Also, it would be nice if you could designate the changed rout as a different path, and not have it be a stop. This would allow you to have smoother directions if you are just tweaking your rout a little bit due to knowing the local area well.

agree with Firefox needing a per-site "whitelist" for allowing context menu mods... methinks I'll be heading over to the mozdev site and making just such a suggestion

Wow, now THIS is cool. I mean, this is REALLY cool. The BACK button on your browser works as an effective and logical Undo for correcting mistakes. This is as it should be.

I would dearly love for some of these features to come to Google Earth. Perhaps Earth will support or include an embedded web browser so that you can just use the AJAX versions of these features? KHTML/Webkit (Safari), Gecko (Firefox), and Opera are all cross platform and include very capable Javascript engines. Additionally, it would be nice to link our Google Accounts to Earth and get our saved maps, mapplets, gadgets and whatever else in delicious 3D. Mind, I'm not saying that such a feature set would be easy, but neither is real-time route remapping.

Yes, I know Google Earth is becoming more and more of a presentation, outreach and research tool, but it still has everyday utility and it needs more lovin'. It is also much more fun.

Mike Cermak and Martin
I would also like to vote up a whitelist for sites we implicitly trust or explicitly award our trust. Obvious suggestion: make sure users can't add a site from the phishing blacklist to his/her trust list without going through hoops.

A warning: this feature sounds suspiciously like Internet Explorer's "Zones" feature, and there have been security problems with sites using tricks to escalate their privileges into the "Trusted Zone". This would have to be designed carefully from top (UI) to bottom (code) to prevent this.

Perhaps an extension first, before integrating it into the major clients?

J. McNair, Mike Cermak, and Martin

I may be wrong, but it looks like the NoScript extensions does precisely what you're all looking for:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/722

"It allows JavaScript, Java and other executable content to run only from trusted domains of your choice, e.g. your home-banking web site, and guards the 'trust boundaries' against cross-site scripting attacks (XSS).
Such a preemptive approach prevents exploitation of security vulnerabilities (known and even unknown!) with no loss of functionality...
Experts do agree: Firefox is really safer with NoScript ;-)"

Niraj Saghvi

Yes and no... while the NoScript extension allows granular specification of WHERE JavaScript is permitted to run, it doesn't seem to allow specification of WHAT aspects of JavaScript are permitted. Essentially, it's the "other half" of Mozilla's built-in JavaScript option specifier, which controls WHAT, but not WHERE.

It looks like it could take some doing to get things exactly the way they're wanted by using a combination of these settings, but it might be worth exploring this weekend... or maybe I'll just make the suggestion to Giorgio to add that aspect to a future version of NoScript (since I've been unable to register at the MozillaZine forums due to some unknown server-side problem)

Thanks to this new feature, I traced a directory from work to home this afternoon. I tried. I got exactly the same time : 17 minutes of travel :-) A shortest way than I used before.

This is really excellent. As a CT resident who frequently travels to NJ, the shortest directions are often the worst possible route since they go through Manhattan at rush hour. I end up using a desktop map program because those have "Avoid Area" options and I can have it route me around the city. Now this feature has finally killed the desktop map for me.

Just realized another even better use: if you want to create a map for someone and you know the route. Just drag it around, and you end up with a nice map and nice directions.

i don't get this anymore... how about you?

Drag and Drop customization still works for me.

It doesn't work for me on the US version either. However it does work on a international version of Google Maps (e.g. maps.google.de / maps.google.fr)

When I go to maps.google.com I can now see the street view option automatically without adding "&gl=us" at the end of the url.

Surprisingly, when I add this "&gl=us" at the end of an url the drag and drop function works again.

So my guess is the drag and drop feature doesn't work for non-us visitors to maps.google.com.

yeah this seems to be the problem.. not a big deal anyway...