Hi. I’m happy to report that the Fedora project is going to use the Mozilla Location Service (MLS) as the default geolocation provider for their Firefox Desktop packages.
Most desktop users use installers and builds provided directly by Mozilla, which can also be used under Linux operating systems. But some users prefer to use packages and builds from a distribution specific package management or installation tool. Mozilla has a contract with Google to provide geolocation services for our desktop users, but this is limited to the builds and installers we produce ourselves. If a third party provides a separate build or package of Firefox Desktop, they have to reach their own deal for geolocation services with Google, like for example the Ubuntu project has done. The Fedora project for various reasons has decided to not buy a commercial contract for geolocation services and thus has been left without working HTML5 geolocation API’s for some time. Today we as Mozilla run our own geolocation project with the Mozilla Location Service (MLS). The service is still provided as-is and not mature, but it does provide a basic service offering. For users of Fedora’s Firefox package using MLS will certainly provide a better experience than not having geolocation at all. In addition users can also use our apps (https://location.services.mozilla.com/apps) to contribute to MLS and ensure that we have location data for their neighborhoods, improving the quality of service they get. If you are curious and want to test MLS in your own browser, you can go to the settings in about:config and adjust the geo.wifi.uri setting. If you are using a Firefox build provided by Mozilla, you can use the following value: https://location.services.mozilla.com/v1/geolocate?key=%GOOGLE_API_KEY% If you are using a build provided by a third party, you can use the value: https://location.services.mozilla.com/v1/geolocate?key=test but might run into rate limitations on the service side, to protect the service from abuse. We do not have any plans to switch the default geolocation provider in Mozilla’s own builds. But using MLS is very much an option for any third party packaging Firefox Desktop. Please come talk to me or reach out on this mailing list. Best, Hanno P.S. Our legal team has volunteered to update our privacy policies and explanations, and we’ll shortly extend the pages at https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/geolocation/ to cover the special Fedora/MLS use-case and prevent Fedora from having to set up their own privacy policy pages. _______________________________________________ dev-geolocation mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-geolocation
