Is Orkut dumping .NET ?

Orkut’s use of the .NET platform is very off-character for Google products, which have typically relied on the LAMP stack. With Orkut just rolling out new language independent URLs, has it finally dumped .NET ?

Old - http://www.orkut.co.in/Home.aspx
New - http://www.orkut.co.in/Main#Home.aspx

The use of the client side fragment identifier is even more interesting. Since the server doesn’t see anything beyond /Main, Orkut probably uses Javascript to listen to changes and reload the page.

Pretty weird, huh ?

Basic API Protection.

Google uses a simple (but probably effective) method to prevent cross-domain API access by adding a while (1) loop to any data sent over Javascript.

If this call is made from the google.com domain via XMLHttpRequest, the while (1) can be stripped out to get the data. But if cross domain access is attempted via the script tag, then it send the browser into an infinite loop, preventing the data from being used.

Google Chrome on Win 2K.

Update: It does not work on Win 2K after all, so if you just wish to download (but not install) then you could use this article.

Update 2: It can be made to work using this.

Though Google Chrome runs on Win 2K SP4 Win XP SP2 and above, the download link only allows XP and Vista users to download. To download on a Win 2K system, you would need to change the user-agent of the browser.

On Firefox, go to about:config, create a new string entry general.useragent.override and set it to this (or something similar). Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; ru; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1