1513763 - Geolocation Quality study

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Data Science :: Experiment Collaboration, task)

Description

[Chris Peterson [:cpeterson]]

Firefox currently uses Google’s Location Service (GLS) for geolocation on sites like Google Maps. We’d like to change Firefox to use the operating system’s location APIs (aka “local provider” in this doc) and fall back to GLS if the local provider fails.

We’d like to run a telemetry study to make sure that there is no regression in the quality of location results returned by local providers compared to GLS.

More details in this mini-PHD:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/185ty6Vvi5RHEN2Oew4xlzdQibwuQZiRi70_zoixTHtQ/edit

Comment 1

[Felix Lawrence]

It was decided not to run an experiment, because we don't have time and we get nearly-good-enough data naturally from the last few beta cycles, and this data showed that for Windows the difference between providers is fine in most cases. On Mac it showed that there are probably other issues we need to fix - nearly no mac clients seemed to be reporting telemetry on geolocation accuracy!