1170945 - mute geolocation requests after some time

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Site Permissions, defect)

Description

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

Some sites (eg, http://www.bunnings.com.au) request geolocation on every page. You can dismiss the notification but the very next link you follow causes it to reappear. While the page sucks, Firefox should still mute these requests after a short period.

Comment 1

[Matthew N. [:MattN]]

Do you really want to treat geolocation differently than other permission doorhangers? We've had similar complaints about the remember password doorhanger anchor. I really wish that geolocation could only be requested upon user interaction (like some other Web APIs) but I kinda doubt we can break compatibility like that.

In the case of this website, do you ever want to allow geolocation for that site? If not, you could say "Never for this site".

Comment 2

[Mark Hammond [:markh] [:mhammond]]

(In reply to Matthew N. [:MattN] from comment #1)
> Do you really want to treat geolocation differently than other permission
> doorhangers?

I'm not sure :) Are there other doorhangers that are guaranteed to appear on every navigation unless the user takes action?

> We've had similar complaints about the remember password
> doorhanger anchor.

Does that doorhanger continue to popup after every navigation?  I see that after every login, but not on every intra-site navigation after that.

> I really wish that geolocation could only be requested
> upon user interaction (like some other Web APIs) but I kinda doubt we can
> break compatibility like that.

Yeah, agreed.

> In the case of this website, do you ever want to allow geolocation for that
> site? If not, you could say "Never for this site".

I could, but then I've been forced to take action because Firefox is annoying me.  (I know it's really that site that's annoying me, but I suspect user's will often not make that distinction.)

FTR, Chrome has a similar problem, although it displays the prompt in an "infobar", so the prompt isn't obscuring content.

TBH I'm not *that* bothered, but it seems something relatively simple we could do to make annoying sites less annoying, in the same vein as popup blocking.

Comment 3

[Emma Zühlcke [:emz]]

Temporary deny and being able to remember the decision is effective against sites spamming geolocation requests. Adding a rate limit on top of that increases complexity and could lead to webcompat issues.