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.
