The developer channel of Google Chrome today got updated to 5.0.342.1. With this release, Google Chrome is certainly heading towards the much awaited Google Chrome OS as Geolocation APIs have been enabled in its early form.
What Does Geolocation Feature Means?
The Geolocation APIs will allow developers to point the location of your computer by analyzing the WiFi networks around your location. This would enable websites to serve content based on the location of the user, which it would access by requesting the browser to share its location. The geolocation feature is optional and would require user confirmation every time.
Geolocation feature is already available on Firefox using its built in api and soon we would see this in the stable builds of Google Chrome.
As of now, this Geolocation feature is very limted and in order to use it you need to be on the latest developer build of google chrome. To enable geolocation, one needs to add the following command line in the browser shortcut :
––enable-geolocation
It is also mentioned that its User Interface is not completed yet and chrome would not remember what permissions you have set earlier.
The Future of Geolocation
As we see most of the browsers are now working on getting the geolocation feature in their browser as a basic feature, so it wont be long when it becomes a norm for browsers to have geolocation. This would enable a better browsing and a more regionally correct content served by websites. Although, as others mentioned, using Wifi to point the location of a user might not be the best option but certainly it would be more accurate than using IPs for the same.
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this is really very great news. however, being a webmaster do we have to make any additional changes to our site?
kieth:
Geolocation is part of HTML5 spec. It does indeed take some small changes to take advantage of it. Take a look at this demo for a simple example.
By the way it appears that the current version of Chrome (5.0.375.55) supports geolocation out of box (no param needed).
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