The Google Maps API supports the same browsers as the Google Local site. Since different applications require different behaviors for users with incompatible browsers, the Maps API provides a global method (GBrowserIsCompatible()) to check compatibility, but it does not have any automatic behavior when it detects an incompatible browser. The script http://maps.google.com/maps?file=api&v=2 can be parsed in almost every browser without errors, so you can safely include that script before checking for compatibility.
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