HTML 5 Geo Location Prompt in Chrome

Question

Just starting to get into HTML 5 and an testing out geo location...liking it so far. I am hitting a bit of a speed bump though...when I try to get my geo location, chrome automatically blocks the page from getting my location. This does not happen at other sites such as the site below:

http://html5demos.com/geo

The scripts I'm using:

<script type="text/javascript" JavaScript" SRC="geo.js"></script>   
<script type="text/javascript" JavaScript" SRC="Utility.js"></script> 
<script type="text/javascript" JavaScript" SRC="jquery.js"></script> 
<script type="text/javascript" JavaScript" SRC="modernizr.js"></script>  

function get_location() {

        if (geo_position_js.init()) {
            geo_position_js.getCurrentPosition(show_map, handle_error);
        }

    }
    function show_map(position) {
        var latitude = position.coords.latitude;
        var longitude = position.coords.longitude;

        alert("lat:" + latitude + " long:" + longitude);


    }
    function handle_error(err) {
        alert(err.code);
        if (err.code == 1) {
            // user said no!
        }
    }

    if (navigator.geolocation) {
        navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(show_map, handle_error);
    } else {
        error('not supported');
    }

I am testing this out from a local directory on my machine, so there isn't really a "domain" like "http://whatever.com/mytestpage.html". Is this why I am not getting prompted? If so, is it possible to force the browswer to request permission to get the user's geo location and is it possible in my scenario?

Answer 1

There's some sort of security restriction in place in Chrome for using geolocation from a file:/// URI, though unfortunately it doesn't seem to record any errors to indicate that. It will work from a local web server. If you have python installed try opening a command prompt in the directory where your test files are and issuing the command:

python -m SimpleHTTPServer

It should start up a web server on port 8000 (might be something else, but it'll tell you in the console what port it's listening on), then browse to http://localhost:8000/mytestpage.html

If you don't have python there are equivalent modules in Ruby, or Visual Web Developer Express comes with a built in local web server.

Answer 2

None of the above helped me.

After a little research I found that as of M50 (April 2016) - Chrome now requires a secure origin (such as HTTPS) for Geolocation.

Deprecated Features on Insecure Origins

The host "localhost" is special b/c its "potentially secure". You may not see errors during development if you are deploying to your development machine.

Answer 3

As already mentioned in the answer by robertc, Chrome blocks certain functionality, like the geo location with local files. An easier alternative to setting up an own web server would be to just start Chrome with the parameter --allow-file-access-from-files. Then you can use the geo location, provided you didn't turn it off in your settings.

Answer 4

Make sure it's not blocked at your settings

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/16404/how-to-disable-the-new-geolocation-feature-in-google-chrome/

Answer 5

if you're hosting behind a server, and still facing issues: try changing localhost to 127.0.0.1 e.g. http://localhost:8080/ to http://127.0.0.1:8080/

The issue I was facing was that I was serving a site using apache tomcat within an eclipse IDE (eclipse luna).

For my sanity check I was using Remy Sharp's demo: https://github.com/remy/html5demos/blob/eae156ca2e35efbc648c381222fac20d821df494/demos/geo.html

and was getting the error after making minor tweaks to the error function despite hosting the code on the server (was only working on firefox and failing on chrome and safari):

"User denied Geolocation"

I made the following change to get more detailed error message:

function error(msg) {
  var s = document.querySelector('#status');
  msg = msg.message ? msg.message : msg; //add this line
  s.innerHTML = typeof msg == 'string' ? msg : "failed";
  s.className = 'fail';

  // console.log(arguments);
}

failing on internet explorer behind virtualbox IE10 on http://10.0.2.2:8080 :

"The current location cannot be determined"

Answer 6

The easiest way is to click on the area left to the address bar and change location settings there. It allows to set location options even for file:///

Answer 7

For an easy workaround, just copy the HTML file to some cloud share, such as Dropbox, and use the shared link in your browser. Easy.

Answer 8

I too had this problem when i was trying out Gelocation API. I then started IIS express through visual studio and then accessed the page and It worked without any issue in all browsers.