834171 - Setting a default handler for the geo: protocol

Status: UNCONFIRMED

(Firefox :: File Handling, enhancement)

Description

[Nicolas FROIDURE]

User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.11 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/23.0.1271.97 Safari/537.11

Steps to reproduce:

I clicked on a link like that : <a href="geo:1.2569,2.215498">a link</a>


Actual results:

It opened a web page telling me that the geo protocol is unsupported.


Expected results:

I think that geo: links should work out of the box. This morning, i had to put a link to Google Maps in order to allow visitors to view a company geolocation.

Since it's not running out of the box, i had to make a hard link to Google Maps instead of using the geo: protocol that would have be much more interesting from the standard and user preference point of view.

In my opinion, the geo protocol adoption, will depend of the abaility of browsers to make it run out of the box.

So please, whatever you use (Gmap, OpenStreetMap), add a default handler to the geo protocol :).

Comment 1

[Nicolas FROIDURE]

Just a precision, it could be also nice to show an unobstruvice dialog (like for passwords) containing this kind of mesage :
You just clicked on a geo: link. The default behavior is to use the "service". You can change it with you prefered service. Button: Change Button: later Button:Never ask again

Comment 2

[Loic]

Like this add-on?
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/geo-uri-scheme-handler/

Comment 3

[Nicolas FROIDURE]

I think it shouldn't be done with an add-on. The reason why i can't use the geo: protocol is that it's unsupported by all browser's.

Chrome ask user's to select a program that can handle the geo protocol. It's a bit better but not enought user friendly.

On mobile world it's pretty well handled by most of the browsers. The desktop browsers should also purpose a default handler.