How in the Tech

Disabling Firefox 3.5′s New Geolocation Feature

By Adam Myers ⋅ June 30, 2009 ⋅ Tags: Firefox, Privacy

Location-aware browsing has taken the world by storm; mainly from the creative uses of the technology in Apple’s iPhone. As a result, many other handset manufacturers have jumped on the bandwagon with their own iterations. For the unaware, location-aware browsing allows me to locate all coffee shops with free WiFi, ordered by distance away from my current location – all at the click of a button on my phone. The possibilities are rather fascinating if you think about it, irregardless of the basic example I just provided. GPS has become prevalent and I feel we’ve only scratched the surface for it’s every day use.

With today’s release of the latest Firefox, Firefox 3.5, Mozilla has taken their own spin on location-aware browsing or geolocation in this instance. As traditionally the technology relies on GPS and very few desktop computers, if any, have that functionality, Mozilla leveraged their close relationship with Google and used Google’s Location Services. Location Services attempts to triangulate or your location based on your computer’s IP address and any nearby wireless access points. As Google already tends to know everything about us, this is often enough to locate your geographical location. Strangely invasive in my opinion.

Visiting websites with this integrated functionality in Firefox 3.5 will generate a familiar Firefox allow or disallow check-box. If you care to share your location with the requesting website thankfully you have a choice.

Unfortunately, there is no preference in the options interface to disable this across the board; a decision that will surely upset all privacy zealots. While the technology is in it’s infancy it might not be such a big deal to actively deny access to the few sites using it, but it’s not hard to see how annoying such a pop-up can become.

Longtime Firefox power users are aware of about:config and it’s gateway into the inner-workings of the browser. It is through this portal that we can completely opt-out of geolocation.

1. In the URL bar type about:config.
2. Type geo.enabled in the filter box.
3. Double click on the returned entry, there should be just one, to toggle the preference from true to false. False disables geolocation across the board.