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What is the "geo.provider.ms-windows-location" preference for?

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  • Last reply by MartyJames

MartyJames
MartyJames
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I take my privacy very seriously and have disabled a large number of Firefox features which erode my privacy, including geo.enabled, dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled, dom.battery.enabled, and many more.

Today I've just found a setting I've never noticed before which makes me really nervous: geo.provider.ms-windows-location

Can anyone please tell me what this does? Is it new? Why doesn't Mozilla have a page/resource explaining what all the preferences do and how to use them?

I take my privacy very seriously and have disabled a large number of Firefox features which erode my privacy, including geo.enabled, dom.event.clipboardevents.enabled, dom.battery.enabled, and many more. Today I've just found a setting I've never noticed before which makes me really nervous: '''geo.provider.ms-windows-location''' Can anyone please tell me what this does? Is it new? Why doesn't Mozilla have a page/resource explaining what all the preferences do and how to use them?

Chosen solution

It's there since years (literally). And it doesn't do anything when geo.enabled is off.

Windows 7 location API is just an abstraction to uniformly talk to underlying sensors. Sensor drivers could include device drivers like GPS, but they would also have to cover other data sources like WiFi or GeoIP databases.

Windows 7 itself doesn't ship with any default sensor drivers. The only thing you might get is a default position specified by the user.

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All Replies (3)

cor-el
cor-el
  • Moderator
  • Top 10 Contributor
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There are prefs for platform specific location services. For Windows this is geo.provider.ms-windows-location.

You will always ask for permission in case a website want to use a geo location service.

See also:

TyDraniu
TyDraniu
  • Top 25 Contributor
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Chosen Solution

It's there since years (literally). And it doesn't do anything when geo.enabled is off.

Windows 7 location API is just an abstraction to uniformly talk to underlying sensors. Sensor drivers could include device drivers like GPS, but they would also have to cover other data sources like WiFi or GeoIP databases.

Windows 7 itself doesn't ship with any default sensor drivers. The only thing you might get is a default position specified by the user.

MartyJames
MartyJames Question owner
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Thank you both, this is great information. You should be able to just click on preferences to see tooltips explaining these kind of details. I'm going to send feedback to Mozilla about this.

Thank you, once again, for your time, and for taking the trouble to help people on this forum. Bless you :-)