14 DAY TRIAL // There is a lot of hype over location-aware services. It seems like the entire web wants to factor in your location and it’s hard to argue with the benefits this brings. Services can be catered specifically to you and knowing where you are enables plenty of them to offer more relevant results. Without browser support, everything remains just a good idea though, which is why it’s good news that Google Chrome finally supports the Geolocation API out of the box.
Preliminary support for the W3C Geolocation API was introduced in the developer builds of Google Chrome a couple of months ago. While the technology was there, it wasn’t enabled by default as more work was needed. The W3C specification is now fully implemented and enabled by default.
This means that, if you navigate to a site that requires location data, you will see a notification message asking you for access confirmation. Based on what your browser is reporting, this allows the site to determine your location.
By default, websites won’t be able to access your location without your explicit approval. If you feel you’ve got nothing to hide, you can enable all sites by default by going to Options menu > Under the Hood > Content Settings > Location where you can select the “Allow all sites to track my physical location” option.
On the other hand, if you don’t want to be bothered, you can select the “Don’t allow any site ...” option. In the Exceptions dialog, you can view the list of sites you have granted access to your location data and remove any or all of them.
If you want to check out the location feature in action, you can go to Google Maps and click on the “Show my location” icon among the left navigation controls. All of this is old news for Firefox users, as support for the Geolocation API has been built-in since Firefox 3.5, almost a year ago.
