There has been some confusion around the Geolocation functionality that we’re including in Firefox 3.1 Beta 1. I thought I might make a short post to try and clear some of it up.

1. Out of the box, Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 doesn’t include any back-end providers of location information.

This is technical-sounding, and it is, but an important thing to understand. Aza has a post that provides some more information on this topic. Simply put: Firefox has to get its location information from something - a GPS, a service like Skyhook or something you set up by hand. This Beta does not include anything out of the box that provides that information - just the hooks to use them if they are available. We’ve seen posts that say we’re including Skyhook or Loki or other things, and that’s not true. That’s why the web-tech post on Beta 1 suggests you install an add-on that lets you set your location manually.

We will include the hooks for people to add this information and the web api is always there, ready to be used by any back-end provider that someone adds. But we didn’t include any back-ends in the beta.

2. We don’t know what we’re going to include with Firefox 3.1 for location information.

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