Geode Brings Location Awareness to Firefox
October 22nd, 2008, 3:05pm by KelvinIs this groundbreaking? The iPhone and Mike’s EyeFi card use a service called Skyhook to determine your location based on your WiFi hotspot, but I dont’ think there’s a way for PC browsers to take the same information and automatically fill in the location fields in services like Yelp, maps, Yahoo yellow pages, etc. This service for Firefox seems like a first step in building the necessary APIs, and it looks like Yahoo has support. Cool or not?
Featured Firefox Extension: Geode Brings Location Awareness to Firefox
October 22nd, 2008 at 4:06 pm
The new version of Firefox is getting ready for stuff like this — among the listed features in 3.1 is:
“Support for new web technologies such as the and elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, web worker threads, SVG transforms and offline applications. More information.”
October 22nd, 2008 at 5:03 pm
From the Ars Technica article about Google Gears using the Geolocation API:
“The Mozilla Foundation introduced its own positioning technology, Geode, two weeks ago. Geode can be downloaded as an add-on for Firefox 3.0 and will be included in 3.1. Geode uses Skyhook’s WiFi data in the current add-on, but the full release will allow a choice of positioning provider, such as a GPS receiver or a Web services firm. ”
So I guess it *is* included in Firefox 3.1.
October 22nd, 2008 at 7:47 pm
Cool, I went to this website in Chrome (mentioned in Google’s Mobile Blog), and it was able to show me the 5 hotels closest to my work. Not a lot of the websites I would ever actually go to support it yet, it seems.