Written on October 9, 2008 – 7:16 am | by Maria Mihale |
Mozilla is preparing Firefox to enter the realm of geo-awareness with a new Labs creation dubbed Geode. The company made an official announcement yesterday and unveiled the experimental Firefox add-on that will take advantage of the W3C Geolocation Spec in Firefox 3.1. The idea is to introduce a location-awareness to the browser, so that whenever you find yourself in a strange town, you could use your laptop in order to find information about location and nearby restaurant suggestions and directions.

Therefore, arriving in a new city, a new continent, a new coffee shop, won’t be a headache anymore. The insecurity of not knowing where you are will be dead and buried. This is when “you pull out your laptop, fire up Firefox, and go to your favorite site review. It automatically deduces your location and serves up some delicious suggestions a couple of blocks away and plots directions there”, as we’re told on Mozilla Labs’ blog.

But don’t rush to become too enthusiastic about this, because things aren’t as simple as they sound. In order to do this, your browser needs to know where you are. And for something like this to happen, the future versions of Firefox are expected to support new W3C Geolocation Specification, which adds the native ability for Web sites to request, and you to optionally grant access to your location. The specifics aren’t ready yet, but there are hopes about location to be provided by one or more user selectable service providers and methods, such as GPS-based, Wi-Fi based, manual entry and so on.



Geode is therefore an experimental add-on meant to explore geolocation in Firefox 3 before implementing it in a future product release and provides an early experiment which involves W3C Geolocation specification. It includes a single experimental geolocation service provider so that any computer with WiFi can get accurate positioning data.

Besides restaurant lookups, Mozilla also offers other possible examples such as RSS readers adjusting based on your present location, knowing the difference between home and work, location-restricted logins and websites that deliver news based on your physical location.

As far as the privacy implications, when a web site asks for your location, a notification bar will ask how much information you are willing to give that site: your exact location, your neighborhood, your city or nothing at all. To map the WiFi signals in your area to your location, Geode uses Shyhook’s Loki technology. Compared to normal GPS-based methods which can take upwards of 45 seconds for a lock, Geode works both inside and outside and has an accuracy of between 10 to 20 meters, normally within a second. In this early implementation, location and IP information you give to the site, are sent to the current provider, that is Shyhook, whenever a website is granted access to your location. But don’t worry, according to Shyhook’s privacy policy, personal identifying information will not be stored and there’s a promise of only keeping data in anonymized aggregate. Mozilla has big hopes concerning Firefox, planning to make service providers and geolocation methods pluggable and user selectable, so that users could have a wide range of choices and privacy options.

The API used by Geode is identical to the one about to debut with Firefox 3.1, but developers can use either in testing applications. The still-in-development Firefox 3.1 version will give you the possibility to choose a geolocation service provider: a peripheral device like a GPS or a web-based service provider like the one used in Geode. A preview version is available to Firefox 3 users starting yesterday, so that people can play a little bit before it is fully integrated into 3.1.

(Source gizmodo.com)