Firefox 3.5 & Fennec Offer Google GeoLocation Services

Mozilla Firefox 3.5 beta 4 version and Firefox mobile web browser aka Fennec will feature Geolocations, thanks to Google. Geo Locations is an opt in addon for the Firefox users that will ask their permission to give them results based on their current location. To figure our your current location the addon will rely on any technique i.e GPS, WiFi or cell tower triangulation or manual address entry. Once the location of the user has been identified, the tool will give the next browsing or searching results accordingly. For example, if you are searching for a “car” price, the Firefox Geolocation addon will get you results in the form of the nearest garages and show rooms based on your current location. This new app will surely increase the overall smartness of the web as well as increase the productivity of the clients. You will no more be getting car prices of UK if you are actually based in America.

Doug Turner from Mozilla has actually worked on the development of this new app and according to his blog,

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 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.

The Mozilla Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 version is expected to be made available soon while the mobile browser Fennec beta version will be launched in the Summer while the alpha version is expected anytime. Do you think Location Based Services has a real future unless the websites are optimized to provide the same services? Give us your comments as we really look forward to them.

To Download Alpha version of Fennec for testing , click here

Via Google Code Updates, Dough T Blog,