Geolocation “Page Info” in Firefox 3.5

Today, I updated the Page Info dialog in Firefox 3.5 to include Geolocation information. It now includes an easy way to see what permissions you granted to a particular page.

So to revoke permissions for a particular site:
* Navigate to the site to which you’ve given permission
* Go to the Tools menu, then select Page Info
* Select the Permissions tab
* Change the setting for Share Location

The default setting is to “Always ask”. Thanks to beltzner for pushing on this, and the entire l10n community for helping with the late changes.

Technorati Tags: geolocation, gps, location, mozilla

sully

skype

today i setup skype for my uncle.  it was such a weird and awesome experience.  Twenty plus years ago, he migrated from Portugal to the US and settled in California.  He hasn’t been back home in a decade.  Sadly, he was recently diagnosed with cancer, and he will not be flying again.  One of his desires, i would imagine, would be to visit the the family he still has back in Portugal.

A week ago, he invited me over to help fix stuff around his house.  Life kept me away, but today I managed to make it over there.  I helped him with his internet connection and got him online again.  While helping him figure out why stuff wasn’t working, I told him about Skype.  Turns out that he has one relative that had an account.  I installed Skype and that contact was online.

Using google translate, I told his relative who I was (apparently even using google translate, i am a faster typer).  Everyone on both sides thought that that it was pretty incredible that I was able to do this.  In any case, within a few seconds we had video chat going.

Although I barely speak Portuguese, I fully understood how this technology stuff has fundamentally made an impact on my uncle’s life.  I was super proud of all of us technologists making hard stuff consumerized.

Error: update is null

If you are seeing this during the use of Geolocation:

Error: update is null
Source File:
file:///C:/Programme/Mozilla%20Firefox%203.5%20Beta%204/components/NetworkGeolocationProvider.js
Line: 218

Then you should be happy to know that we also see it, and it will be fixed for the RC.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=490046

Geolocation in Firefox 3.5 and Fennec

I’m excited to introduce a new feature in Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 that I’ve been working on called geolocation. Geolocation is an opt-in tool that lets users share their location information with web sites through Firefox and will enable a new range of services on the web. Geolocation can make web sites smarter and you more productive. Websites that use geolocation will ask where you are in order to bring you more relevant information, or to save you time while searching. Let’s say you’re looking for a pizza restaurant in your area. A website will be able to ask you to share your location so that simply searching for “pizza” will bring you the answers you need…no further information or extra typing required.

This idea isn’t new. We have been researching meshing geolocation data and the web for a few years. Last year, Mozilla Labs released an experimental addon, Geode, which implemented the draft W3C Geolocation Specification. We added support for the spec to Firefox 3.5 and “Fennec” (our mobile browser which is in development) as well as a user interface that put the user in control of which websites could use location. However, we left it to add-ons to implement the code that would actually figure out your location, using any technique (GPS, WiFi or cell tower triangulation, manual address entry) of their choosing. So, with Firefox 3.1, 3.5 or Fennec, plus a third-party add-on, users would be able to use location-enabled websites.

However, we were still left with a chicken-or-egg problem: unless lots and lots of users installed an add-on, websites wouldn’t have a significant audience for which to develop location-enabled services; and without lots of useful web content using the feature, users had no reason to install an add-on.

We decided to investigate bundling a technology that would provide an end-to-end solution, so that the feature would work out of the box for users, and would give websites a large enough potential user base to kick start the development of innovative apps and services. We had learned a lot from the discussions about the various add-ons that had been built, and in other forums over the last few years. Earlier this year, I hosted a talk on Location in Mozilla during which we reviewed many of the critical privacy issues. We boiled these down to some key principles:
* protecting user privacy.

User privacy is super important to us and we believe that we have the best privacy policies regarding your data. The use of the WiFi data, IP addresses, associated protocol bits, should never be used to spy on users, track individuals, or shared without your permission.

* enabling web developers to use the API in an unencumbered way that would work in all browsers that implement the spec

Web developers can use a standard way of accessing geolocation data and not have to worry about the underlying geolocation provider. We don’t share with third-party location provider(s) any information about websites the user’s visiting; this protects both the user’s privacy, and the website’s right to write to a web standard without fear of any third party gaining insight into how the site is being used.

* preserving user choice

This feature is completely opt-in! If you don’t do anything, geolocation is never used. When a web page wants ask you for your location, you get an dialog similar to the one below. If you do nothing, the feature stays off by default. Only if you press “Tell them”, will you send out your location information. Furthermore, users are free to use a different geolocation provider by installing addons.

* applicability to both Firefox and Fennec

To avoid fragmentation on the web, the geolocation feature should be consistent between the desktop and mobile. The truth really is that the line is getting blurred between mobile and desktop. Calling the geolocation feature “mobile only” discounts many use cases that are pretty important.

Given these principles and a strong desire to create an “out of the box” experience in Firefox and Fennec, and to kick start the location aware web, we are happy to announce that Firefox 3.5 and Fennec will be using Google Location Service. We found that we agreed on the many privacy concerns around location. Do check out Mozilla’s privacy policy and Google’s privacy policy. I am pretty excited about these policies I think they are going to be the industry standard when it comes to network based geolocation providers.

Just to provide a bit of technical detail on what exactly is going on, below I will walk through a simple geolocation request.

1) A user goes to a page that has some Javascript that asks for a Geolocation.

2) When the user loads that page, we put up a dialog.

3) If they don’t click anything, or click no, we do not do any geolocation stuff and simply return an error to the requestor.

4) If they click yes, we drop into this bit of code which packages up the WiFi Access Point data into JSON and sends it to Google Location Services over HTTPS. The URL is configurable by preferences (”geo.wifi.uri”). The data sent includes a version number, access token, and an array of public WiFi access points data. The access token basically acts like a two week cookie, and if you clear cookies in the browser, this value is deleted and a new one is used.

6) Lastly, the Google Location service returns a location. It’s another json object that is an actual location.

That’s it. For more information, check out the Frequently Asked Questions. Get ready for Firefox 3.5 and start thinking about how you can location aware your web apps! Here is the spec.

Got questions, feel free to ask. I am looking for feedback. Comments welcome.

Device Orientation

I have a proposal for exposing device orientation in the browser. It is a pretty simple api that allows you to monitor motion changes from Javascript.

For example:


navigator.orientation.watchOrientation(draw);

function draw(o) {
// o.x, o.y, o.z
}


o in function draw is a vector in three dimensional space in meters /
(seconds^2) units.

This allows you to do some revolutionary stuff on the web. This is a simple test web page that moves a ball around a web page. I am just loading this web page directly with XUL Runner on Windows Mobile Professional 6.

This only supports exists on HTC devices but i do expect other devices that have accelerometers to have implementations.

I am tracking this feature in bug 485943. Please check it out and let me know what you think.

windows ce hardware keyboard help

Many devices have both hardware keyboards as well as a software keyboard.

In Fennec, we need to know if we should ask Windows to display the software keyboard when the user clicks in a text box. For example, if the device has a hardware keyboard exposed to the user (in that they see it in front of them), we don’t want to show the software keyboard.

I have tried:

1) HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Shell\HasKeyboard. This value stays the same no matter if the keyboard slide to the open position or not.

2) GetKeyboardStatus(). Same as above

3) Smart Auto-Deploy event. I tried listening for the “_KeyPress” event. That seems to work fine (I know that a key was pressed on the hardware keyboard), but it really doesn’t tell you if the keyboard has been slide closed again.

Anyone know how to do this?

no on the r-word

One thing that always rubs me the wrong way when people use the r-word. It is like walking through a cloud of cigarette smoke as a non-smoker. I clearly do not have the right to ask them to quit, but I would rather not be around it. I have, in the past and only to people that I care about, explain how it isn’t a great thing to say.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not some uptight guy that never swears. The sad truth is before I was involved with the special needs community, I would have never thought twice on how I acted with respect to dropping the r-word. Thinking back, I feel ashamed…

check out this guy who can sum this issue up definitely then me.

tinderbox hg hook

Here is a hg hook to prevent you from pushing changes when the Firefox tinderbox is reporting anything other than success.

create a new file, and paste this into it:


#!/bin/bash
if ! curl -s http://tinderbox.mozilla.org/showbuilds.cgi?tree=Firefox\&quickparse=1 | cut -d '|' -f 4 | grep -v "success"; then
echo "tinderbox is open. pushing...."
exit 0
fi
echo "tinderbox is burning. exiting"
exit 1


Then in your .hgrc file, add a line like:


preoutgoing.hg_tbox_hook = /Users/dougt/builds/hg_tbox_hook


Result my vary. Don’t depend on this to save your butt; check tinderbox often. Note that there is some delay between the time that tinderbox knows that there is a problem, and the time that the “quickparse.txt” file is generated. Hopefully, we can resolve this quickly so that this hook is more useful.

thanks philor for the pro tip. script above now uses the non-static tinderbox quicktest url.

my airmozilla geo talk

hey, i gave a talk about geolocation on air.mozilla. please check it out. You’ll need a Firefox 3.1 nightly or beta releases watch the video.

In the video, I mentioned the strawman position statement and here it is. I am interested in hearing what you think!

Privacy considerations for implementers of the Geolocation API:

User Agents must not send geolocation data to websites without expressed permission of the user. Browsers will acquire permission through a user interface which will include the document origin URI. All permissions should be revocable, and applications should respect revoked permissions.

Some User Agents will have prearranged trust relationship that do not require such user interfaces. For example, Firefox will present a user interface the when example.com performs a geolocation request. However, a voip telephone may not present any user interface when using a geolocation to perform an E911 function.

Privacy considerations for recipients of location information:

The two primary concerns regarding recipients of geolocation data are retention and retransmission. Recipient of location information should retain location information only as long as required. Users must be allowed to update and delete location information that they have posted. Recipient of location information should not retransmit the location information without the user’s consent. Care should be taken when retransmitting and use of HTTPS is encouraged. Furthermore, a clear and accessible privacy policy should be made available to all users that details the usage of location data.