How does HTML5 Geolocation Work?

Question

Chrome and Firefox have HTML Geolocation implemented.

My question is: how does it work? Do they have a Database locally and get the information from the provider the

Answer 1

For what it's worth, the API specification itself is agnostic to the geolocation implementation. So while it's true that Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome both rely on network-enabled geolocation via Google's Location Service database, that's not a requirement of the standard. For example, Mobile Safari on your iPhone will in some cases use GPS rather than WiFi-triangulation or cell-site geolocation, depending on what location service is most accurate and accessible at a given moment.

And we can hope that future browsers will provide some choice of the location provider. I agree that it would be good for user privacy and functionality if browsers supported geolocation technologies that didn't require sending a list of WiFi IDs to a third party; I suspect that as GPS sensors are more often integrated into smartphones and laptops, we'll see browsers that let you use GPS sensing for the W3C Geolocation API. It might also be nice to have a feature for desktop computers where the location can be manually specified in browser settings, this would also be compatible with the current spec.