Geolocation and Firefox

[Doug Turner]

I recently added support for geolocation in the mozilla
platform. Our implementation closely follows the w3c
draft spec [1]. We implemented it such that
application need to provide their own UI. This allows
Mozilla Fennec to do what is natural on a mobile
device, and for Mozilla Firefox to do what it
deems necessary.

For many Firefox users, they do not have access to a
device that can provide a location such as a GPS, a
Wifi->location service, etc. For these uses, it may be
enough to let them set there location in some UI. I
created an addon for Firefox (nightlies) that both
enables a UI for Firefox, but also allows the user to
set their location [2].

Clearly this isn't the complete story, of course. Many
of us have laptops and all of which have wifi. And
there are very good Wifi->location providers available.
GPSs are getting cheaper, and they are available
everywhere. Not taking advantage of these devices
seems to miss the point. So, the implementation has a
plugable nature such that 3rd parties can drop in a
component, and ta-da, it just works. For example, I
created a NMEA extension that provides the glue needed
between most gps devices and firefox [3].

I would love to be able to get the UI support in
Firefox. This would allow the "extension" to be more
or less the glue between a geolocation device and
mozilla. We do not have to do the fancy "user defined
position" stuff in the extension, just some info bar
UI... something like [5]

Does this seem like the right approach to everyone?

[1] http://dev.w3.org/geo/api/spec-source.html
[2] https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8420
[3] http://hg.mozilla.org/users/dougt_mozilla.com/index.cgi/nmea/
[4] http://dougt.wordpress.com/2008/08/08/geolocation-today/
[5] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=328959&action=edit

[Robert Kaiser]

Doug Turner wrote:
> I would love to be able to get the UI support in
> Firefox. This would allow the "extension" to be more
> or less the glue between a geolocation device and
> mozilla. We do not have to do the fancy "user defined
> position" stuff in the extension, just some info bar
> UI... something like [5]
>
>
> Does this seem like the right approach to everyone?

Why "in Firefox" and not "in Toolkit, overrideable by XULRunner apps"
just like we have it for download manager? I guess that a bunch of other
toolkit-based applications would want such UI as well, and it doesn't
sound like something we should all copy from FF if we could share it.

Robert Kaiser