If you know how to muck with about:config, there is an easy way to set your location manually.  First figure out your longitude and latitude.  There area bunch of tools on the web that gets you this.  Once you have this, you can do the following:

1) Open up about:config

2) search for geo.wifi.uri

3) change the value to:

http://snaptome.appspot.com/loc/json?latitude=your_lat&longitude=your_lon&accuracy=10

Thats it.  I hope this helps.

Desktop Notifications

Desktop notifications allow a web page to notify the user using system level services, such as Growl, in a clean, safe, and easy to use manner.

The code is very simple:

navigator.notification.notify("Another Desktop Notification",
                              "Check out my icon",
                              "http://dougt.org/me.jpg");

and the result is something you’d expect from a notification.  On the Mac, the notification may look like:

You can get more sophisticated by adding a callback when the user clicks on the Desktop Notification:

navigator.notification.notify("Another Desktop Notification",
                              "Check out my icon",
                              "http://dougt.org/me.jpg");
                              function() { /*do something*/ });

A user must grant each site permission before they can use Desktop Notifications.  We will use the familiar notification bar (the text isn’t final.  Also, these will end up looking quite different in future releases of Firefox.):

That is there all there is to it!

Get involved:

If you like or dislike this feature, please just leave a comment.

If you like to follow the implementation details, you can follow bug 573588.

You can try out the engineering builds.  There are bound to be a few bugz.  If you see anything funky, please let me know.

If you are using the above engineering builds, you can try out Desktop Notifications.

More details:

I reviewed two draft specifications.  The first is the WebNotification specification and the other is the Google Gears NotificationAPI.  I found both of these APIs more complex than what was required.  Clearly both of these other APIs have use cases that are not address by my proposal.  But for basic notification from the browser, not much is required.

Looking at what Growl and other system level notification services provide, you basically only need a title, a description, and an icon.  For fun, I added one callback if the user clicks on the notification while it is on screen.

Next Steps

You tell me.  Is this something you’d like to see in the browser?  Does the API work for your use cases?

Let me know what you think!

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mobile/nightly/latest-mobile-trunk/fennec.apk

No auto-updating yet, so check back often.  Send your feedback to the forum.

This idea isn’t new. We have been researching meshing geolocation data and the web for a few years. Last year, Mozilla Labs released an experimental addon, Geode, which implemented the draft W3C Geolocation Specification. We added support for the spec to Firefox 3.5 and “Fennec” (our mobile browser which is in development) as well as a user interface that put the user in control of which websites could use location. However, we left it to add-ons to implement the code that would actually figure out your location, using any technique (GPS, WiFi or cell tower triangulation, manual address entry) of their choosing. So, with Firefox 3.1, 3.5 or Fennec, plus a third-party add-on, users would be able to use location-enabled websites.

However, we were still left with a chicken-or-egg problem: unless lots and lots of users installed an add-on, websites wouldn’t have a significant audience for which to develop location-enabled services; and without lots of useful web content using the feature, users had no reason to install an add-on.

We decided to investigate bundling a technology that would provide an end-to-end solution, so that the feature would work out of the box for users, and would give websites a large enough potential user base to kick start the development of innovative apps and services. We had learned a lot from the discussions about the various add-ons that had been built, and in other forums over the last few years. Earlier this year, I hosted a talk on Location in Mozilla during which we reviewed many of the critical privacy issues. We boiled these down to some key principles:
* protecting user privacy.

User privacy is super important to us and we believe that we have the best privacy policies regarding your data. The use of the WiFi data, IP addresses, associated protocol bits, should never be used to spy on users, track individuals, or shared without your permission.

* enabling web developers to use the API in an unencumbered way that would work in all browsers that implement the spec

Web developers can use a standard way of accessing geolocation data and not have to worry about the underlying geolocation provider. We don’t share with third-party location provider(s) any information about websites the user’s visiting; this protects both the user’s privacy, and the website’s right to write to a web standard without fear of any third party gaining insight into how the site is being used.

* preserving user choice

This feature is completely opt-in! If you don’t do anything, geolocation is never used. When a web page wants ask you for your location, you get an dialog similar to the one below. If you do nothing, the feature stays off by default. Only if you press “Tell them”, will you send out your location information. Furthermore, users are free to use a different geolocation provider by installing addons.

* applicability to both Firefox and Fennec

To avoid fragmentation on the web, the geolocation feature should be consistent between the desktop and mobile. The truth really is that the line is getting blurred between mobile and desktop. Calling the geolocation feature “mobile only” discounts many use cases that are pretty important.

Given these principles and a strong desire to create an “out of the box” experience in Firefox and Fennec, and to kick start the location aware web, we are happy to announce that Firefox 3.5 and Fennec will be using Google Location Service. We found that we agreed on the many privacy concerns around location. Do check out Mozilla’s privacy policy and Google’s privacy policy. I am pretty excited about these policies I think they are going to be the industry standard when it comes to network based geolocation providers.

Just to provide a bit of technical detail on what exactly is going on, below I will walk through a simple geolocation request.

1) A user goes to a page that has some Javascript that asks for a Geolocation.

2) When the user loads that page, we put up a dialog.

3) If they don’t click anything, or click no, we do not do any geolocation stuff and simply return an error to the requestor.

4) If they click yes, we drop into this bit of code which packages up the WiFi Access Point data into JSON and sends it to Google Location Services over HTTPS. The URL is configurable by preferences (“geo.wifi.uri”). The data sent includes a version number, access token, and an array of public WiFi access points data. The access token basically acts like a two week cookie, and if you clear cookies in the browser, this value is deleted and a new one is used.

6) Lastly, the Google Location service returns a location. It’s another json object that is an actual location.

That’s it. For more information, check out the Frequently Asked Questions. Get ready for Firefox 3.5 and start thinking about how you can location aware your web apps! Here is the spec.

Got questions, feel free to ask. I am looking for feedback. Comments welcome.

Reflow of Mozilla.org:

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=1020647662203348823]

Reflow of Google.co.jp:

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-1471976166301235697]

Reflow of Wikipedia:

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docid=-5863446593724321515]

If you produced these, kudos!  If you know how to produce such things, please drop a note!

Update:

Satoshi Ueyama is the author of this cool demo.  He sent Gen a note on how he did it:

First, he builds Mozilla so that the layout portions (nsIFrame::SetRect, nsIFrame::SetSize, nsIFrame;;SetPosition, PresShell::DoReflow, etc) are set to output to the log file.

He then gives an example of the log of each of the frame movements from Reflow:

{"event": "MoveFrame", "frame": {"address": "0x04FE41A8", "type":
"TextFrame", "content": {"address": "0x05014150", "type": "other"},
"rect": {"x": 0, "y": 0, "w": 0, "h": 0}}},
{"event": "MoveFrame", "frame": {"address": "0x04FE41A8", "type":
"TextFrame", "content": {"address": "0x05014150", "type": "other"},
"rect": {"x": 0, "y": 0, "w": 0, "h": 0}}},

Here is an example of dump from the termination of the tree structure.

{"event": "FinishReflow", frame:
 {"address": "0x04FE3E28", "type": "ViewportFrame", "content": null,
"children":[
     {"address": "0x04FE4000", "type": "ScrollFrame", "content":
{"address": "0x04FD4858", "type": "element", "tagName": "HTML"},
"children":[
         {"address": "0x04FE43EC", "type": "ScrollbarFrame",
"content": {"address": "0x04FFEFF8", "type": "element", "tagName":
"scrollbar"}, "children":[
             {"address": "0x04FE4578", "type": "BoxFrame", "content":
{"address": "0x04FFE0F8", "type": "element", "tagName":
"xul:scrollbarbutton"} }
     ,
       {"address": "0x04FE47BC", "type": "sliderFrame", "content":
{"address": "0x04FFE278", "type": "element", "tagName": "xul:slider"},
"children":[
                 {"address": "0x05004E6C", "type": "BoxFrame",
"content": {"address": "0x050030E8", "type": "element", "tagName":
"xul:thumb"}, "children":[
                     {"address": "0x05004FDC", "type": "BoxFrame",
"content": {"address": "0x050013F0", "type": "element", "tagName":
"xul:gripper"} }
         ] }

He then makes the video animation (for Google Video he suggests Ruby+Ruby/SDL, for the video from Mozilla 24 he used C+++Direct3d.) As memory address is outputted to the log each frame can be distinct.

The behavior of each frame in chronological order is reproducible as the log has each frame’s memory. (For instance, in tracking the frame “address”:”0x04FE41A8″, you can reproduce that frame’s behavior chronologically.

UPDATE:

New links for the videos (thanks Gen!):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJtBUHyNBxs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTnIxIA5KGw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dndeRnzkJDU