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Geolocation in Firefox horribly inaccurate compared to other browsers

  • 4 replies
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  • Last reply by Entegy

Entegy
Entegy
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When attempting to use Geolocation in Firefox, it is horrible inaccurate. Taking for example, the example on Mozilla's site, the result is a large blue circle will take up my entire city. Using Mozilla's example site in other browsers (Chrome and Safari), they will get my location exactly.

According to the documentation, Firefox is supposed to poll surrounding WiFi points and my IP address to narrow it down. Yet Firefox cannot get an accurate fix when the other browsers can. This makes the feature useless on sites that use Geolocation, especially when doing "nearby" searches when you live in a large, populous city. Firefox seems to only be using IP to determine location.

Where does the fault lie here and is there anything I can do to make Geolocation in Firefox actually be accurate?

When attempting to use Geolocation in Firefox, it is horrible inaccurate. Taking for example, the [http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/geolocation/ example] on Mozilla's site, the result is a large blue circle will take up my entire city. Using Mozilla's example site in other browsers (Chrome and Safari), they will get my location exactly. According to the documentation, Firefox is supposed to poll surrounding WiFi points and my IP address to narrow it down. Yet Firefox cannot get an accurate fix when the other browsers can. This makes the feature useless on sites that use Geolocation, especially when doing "nearby" searches when you live in a large, populous city. Firefox seems to only be using IP to determine location. Where does the fault lie here and is there anything I can do to make Geolocation in Firefox actually be accurate?

Modified by Entegy

All Replies (4)

cor-el
cor-el
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Did you grant permission to use geolocation via the bar at the top?

You can manage all permissions on the about:permissions page via the location bar.

Entegy
Entegy Question owner
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Yes, I've given permanent permission to mozilla.org (for the purpose of the example site ) and Firefox continues to not get an accurate location.

cor-el
cor-el
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Entegy
Entegy Question owner
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I have no idea what that did, but now Firefox is accurate to my location. However, I'm going to try being at other locations and seeing how Firefox copes before marking this answered.