There has been some confusion around the Geolocation functionality that we’re including in Firefox 3.1 Beta 1. I thought I might make a short post to try and clear some of it up.
1. Out of the box, Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 doesn’t include any back-end providers of location information.
This is technical-sounding, and it is, but an important thing to understand. Aza has a post that provides some more information on this topic. Simply put: Firefox has to get its location information from something – a GPS, a service like Skyhook or something you set up by hand. This Beta does not include anything out of the box that provides that information – just the hooks to use them if they are available. We’ve seen posts that say we’re including Skyhook or Loki or other things, and that’s not true. That’s why the web-tech post on Beta 1 suggests you install an add-on that lets you set your location manually.
We will include the hooks for people to add this information and the web api is always there, ready to be used by any back-end provider that someone adds. But we didn’t include any back-ends in the beta.
2. We don’t know what we’re going to include with Firefox 3.1 for location information.
It’s possible we’ll provide nothing. But so far no decisions have been made about what to include to provide location information. Skyhook was a partner for the Labs Geode experiment, but we don’t know what we’re shipping in 3.1 final yet.
3. The browser is providing location information, not information about where you live.
This is a distinction that Boris brought up, and it’s important. What we’ve done is add the ability for the browser to hand out location information. This information does not have to be related to where you live or work or even personally related to you in any way. Most people will likely use it for that, but just to be clear on this topic: we believe that the user should be in control of if they want to expose this information to web sites or not.
I think that most of the confusion results from the fact that this is pretty new to the browsing experience and people don’t yet know how to interpret it. Normal human beings probably don’t understand how to answer questions about this, or what exposing location information to the web means to them. So there will be some learning that will need to happen for both users and providers alike. This will be an iterative process.
Thanks for clearing that up, make a whole lot more sense now.
I’m skeptical of the usefulness of this feature for most users. I’ve seen sites that try to map IP addresses into locations, often with really bad results (like all workers at a worldwide company appearing to be located in one city, where the corporate gateway resides).
But even if Firefox knows (by asking the appropriate location information source) where I live, that’s going to be of limited relevance. A resource that lets me ask what services are near to a certain street address (which might be my own address, or might be some place I’m planning to be) is a lot more useful. But Google Maps can already do that.
Finally, a site that I do business with is more likely to need my mailing address than my current latitude and longitude (unless it plans to fire missiles at me).
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I think this feature is pretty awesome. However, I think it will end up as a PR nightmare in terms of privacy. The potential for it to backfire, in my opinion, makes it more risky than it is worth.
Joe – that’s what I’m thinking too… has anyone yet come up with a really good ‘killer’ use for this kind of thing? It seems like a lot of effort is going into this geolocation effort, but I’ve not seen anyone saying why they think it’s useful…
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For me, a killer use would be: never entering my current location in the ‘From’ location field when using Google Maps on my laptop, *while being on the road* – turning my laptop, web browser, together with a site like GMaps in a navigational tool.
Mix that with the future mobile builds of Firefox and you have a terrific open mobile platform to develop navigational tools.
you should include “connecting to localhost’s gpsd server if available” as the default…
Why isn’t Firefox 3.1b1 on the beta update channel?
Joe Buck, “I’m skeptical of the usefulness of this feature for most users.”
??!?? Maybe if all you ever do is access a local site or mapping site from a stationary computer then indeed you don’t need this because you’ve probably told that one site your area. But I visit hundreds of other web sites.
Airline sites that prefill my nearest airport; network TV sites that know my timezone and local station instead giving me useless “at 9pm 7 central, 6PDT (unless pre-empted by sports game)”; and 100,000 brick & mortar sites that TELL me my nearest store instead of making me fill out yet another store locator form. It saves a lot of typing and lets sites present info right away (*if* I let them access my location).
As for privacy, I hope someone makes a provider that lets me choose from a list of saved place that are near but *not* my actual addresses, e.g. the police station several streets away from home, the bus stop near work, etc.
Perhaps, on Linux platforms at least, you could use geoclue, which has a number of backends, including GPS, cell tower, ip address, and manual. http://geoclue.freedesktop.org
You guys should write a component to implement this for Linux. Basically you need to write a component that implements this interface:
https://developer.mozilla.org/en/nsIGeolocationProvider
And it should work.
Looks like with the latest builds gpsd can be used as a geolocation provider out of the box.
Please check out the bug https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=492328
which is now marked as resolved.
This is pretty cool development :-)