629089 - Camino does not support W3C Geolocation API

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Camino Graveyard :: General, defect)

Description

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Camino does not support the navigator.geolocation API, even though Firefox 3.6 (Gecko 1.9.2) does.

* Browser geolocation test:
http://benwerd.com/lab/geo.php

Comment 1

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

No one but Firefox is allowed to use Google's location provider, so I'm not sure how having that support is supposed to do anything without a provider.

I imagine the back-end support is built and we just need to package an XPT to make that work (though again without a provider, not sure what good it would do), but we'd have to hook up support for listening for the site's request, showing a permission request to the user, and then add UI for changing/removing site permissions.

Comment 2

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

I thought maybe hendy had looked at this when we were moving to 1.9.2, but before I submitted this comment to that effect I ended up looking myself.

We'd need to package necko_wifi and dom_geolocation xpts, as well as NetworkGeolocationProvider.js and GPSDGeolocationProvider.js JS components.

For reference, if one day there is a real location provider available, bug 437948 implemented geolocation (with C++ location providers for phones supported by Fennec), bug 487467 implemented wifi (with Google as the location provider) and the Firefox UI--though with lots of subsequent follow-ups, including bug 488218--and bug 492328 added GPSD as a provider for geeks with attached GPS devices.

Without a real location provider (see bug 494421, going on two years of waiting), though, packaging all this stuff and writing all the UI code is pointless.  (On the referenced test page, the UI works in SeaMonkey, but the test returns a "cannot get location" error.)

(As a further reminder, we'd also have to update the privacy policy if we ever shipped this.)

Comment 3

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Sam argued in the channel the other day that we could write our own provider that wraps CoreLocation on 10.6 and thus at least have something for 10.6 users.

I imagine the CL part is not hard at all (minus the lookup dance), but making it talk to Gecko is probably less fun. (We'd also probably get CL's request UI rather than anything we could manage/localize.)