14 DAY TRIAL // A few days after it introduced an update to its Beta channel, Google has made available for download a new testing release of the next major iteration of its open source browser. Google Chrome 5.0.342.1 is currently available for download for Windows, Mac, and Linux, bringing to the table new features that devs need to test-drive. An illustrative example in this regard is geolocation support in Chrome 5.0.
Google is playing catch-up with Mozilla, which already offers geolocation capabilities with Firefox. And, in fact, there are more similitudes between Chrome and Firefox in terms of allowing the browser to know and report the position of the end user worldwide. Essentially, both Google and Mozilla are leveraging the same Geolocation application programming interface.
This, of course, goes a tad deeper, and is a matter of modern web standards support, in this particular respect, of HTML5 adoption. Among its many new features, HTML5 brings to the table a little something dubbed Browser GeoLocation. By leveraging the Geolocation application programming interface (API), websites are able to get exact location information from browsers, such as Firefox 3.5, 3.6 and later, and now Chrome 5. In fact, sites can determine the exact location of the user as long as an application with support for the Geolocation API is used in order to browse.
Karen Grunberg, from the Google Chrome team, revealed that geolocation was disabled by default in Google Chrome 5.0.342.1. In order to enable it, testers need to change the way the browser is run with the addition of --enable-geolocation. The easiest way for early adopters to do this is by rightclicking the Chrome 5.0.342.1 shortcut on the desktop, selecting Properties and, under Target, modifying the default C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe to be C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --enable-geolocation. At the same time, users need to be aware of the fact that only the Windows and Mac OS X (with the exception of version 10.6 for Mac) support Wifi-based location.
Google Chrome 5.0.342.1 Dev Channel update is available for download here.
Google Chrome 4.1 Beta for Windows is available for download here.
Google Chrome 4.0 Stable is available for download here.