Geolocation in Firefox and Beyond

In preparation for her keynote on the at the Web 2.0 Expo, Mitchell and I recently chatted about the “mobile web” misnomer. The misnomer is that there is going to be, long term, such a thing as a separate mobile web. There should only the one web (to rule them all), with different views into it, depending on the particular limitations or abilities of the device you are using.

One place I see the desire to separate the two webs is in geolocation. Location is often billed as the next killer-app of the mobile world, and people generally assume that it is a feature that will be bound to mobile devices. Yet, there are compelling reasons to have location information available to laptops as well: it is nice to have contextually relevant information available to me while working at a new coffee shop, traveling, or when farblonjet. At the core of the one-Web vision is the continuity of experience across…

Read the rest of the post for the proposed API and other good stuff.

geoip is a big pita. this might be the solution to the problem, but only as long as the user can choose and is not required to.
this another feature that need to be bullet proof in terms of security!

the concept of providing a Geolocated version for a web app will be something like designing for a wide range of screen resolutions or multiple devices in a near future, for that, we need more open geo ip database servers for mobile and web before a wide adoption. Congrats for the wonderful idea.