I am sure we will continue pushing the browser to take advantage of device apis. We balance privacy and security, with features.

Feel free to try out other browsers. I think all but IE have implemented geolocation, so that might be your best bet.

So, who do you think is buying this, Doug?
Frankly speaking, I believe it was a black day when Google entered the boat to take over the development of a once really promising project. Ever since then, more and more privacy-devastating features have been introduced “for the user’s benefit”, without any user consent in the first place. I’ve been using Mozilla for some 10 years now, so I’m able to add my 5 cents about this. So what’s the fuzz:

Fine-grained control options for basic privacy features have tended of being replaced by unusable “binary” switches in the preferences (e.g. cookies, images, as opposed to Seamonkey). New, even much worse privacy threat regulators have not been represented in the preferences in the first place – DOM.STORAGE (even ACTIVE by default!), FLASH CONTROL, JAVASCRIPT FINE CONTROL, IPv6 (active by default). No user consent or interaction is possible for any of those at all, unless you manually edit “about:config”! What’s worse, this way, no one ever takes notice about those options.
Now you’ve come up with this “beneficial GEO-location helper”, sneakingly introducing it without any doubt, that everybody wants it, because YOU like it (or should I say: GOOGLE wants it)? Fits very nice into other googlification measures, like the “anti-phising” tool and the default search engine settings. OK, so Google actually is the most-used one and it’s sponsoring Firefox, so default here is ok by me – I can change that if I like.

I really wonder what kind of “funny” ideas about “privacy” you guys have, seriously. Some “Freedom Fries” anybody? Introducing stuff like this GEO crap actually is not acceptable, no way! Show some responsibility – if YOU like it, then make some addon, which anybody, keen on being geo-located, can download and install. If YOU think locating people is already easy enough right now, stop acting completely ignorant by making things even worse, that’s what I ask you for. Eggs for people who like eating eggs, chickens for people who like to “chicken out”. That’s what’s called “freedom of choice”. And if Google wants to sneak up on the whole world, let them proliferate their Chrome thingy to anybody who likes it and infest as many websites with their “helpful” services and playing benefactor for as many projects they want to, but don’t support them actively by arbitralily implementing such bull**** features!

If I don’t see this crap getting removed soon, I’ll be changing my default browser for good, and I’ll encourage everybody I know to do alike. Thanks on behalf of the people who chose Mozilla over IE for those very reasons.

yours sincerely,
George Dataminer

http://www.ip2location.com/html5geolocationapi.aspx

The color of the river isn’t nice, but well, it’s better than nothing XD There are some pictures of the Parana River (in Rosario) at flickr.

I was messing around with some sites that use geolocation in Firefox, and proxying to see how the proxy data was interpreted by various sites using the geolocation API. So for example using a proxy in California and (as expected) the geolocation sets your current location to the proxy’s geographic area.

Unfortunately somehow things got “stuck” and applications like Google Maps now think I am in California (where one of the proxies was), rather than my real location several states away. Even though I have cleared local browser data (all cache, cookies etc), restarted my machine and moved to several other wireless access points (with different IPs) locally.

Google Maps “locate me” feature puts me in my correct location once, then after that if I reload the page it puts in California every time.

But if I use some sample code to query Gears, http://www.webmonkey.com/tutorial/Track_User_Geolocation_With_JavaScript (see the Gears example, not Geode) I get my correct location every time.

Is there a client cache somewhere that Google Maps might be reading from? I have cleared out the geo.location.accesstoken values in about:config in Firefox, I have even tried a new browser profile, but to no avail. Applications, and Google Maps keep thinking I am in California. I cannot figure out where it could be reading this data from.

Any ideas?