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Introducing GeoLocateFox

GeoLocateFoxI got this idea back in mid December, wrote down a few lines of code, and stashed it to the side because I was in the middle of finals. Around new years I came back to the idea and implemented it. This ended up being a submission for Extend Firefox. I’m not sure what others will think of it, but I found it fun. It’s still a little limited, but has some potential.

What does GeoLocateFox do?

The extension makes use of geolocation meta tags provided by some webpages (such as this one). On such pages, the icon GeoLocateFox Icon illuminates to alert you to such content. You can then put your mouse over the icon to get a map of where the website originates. Double Clicking on the icon will bring up a full size map.

Why aren’t there any non-US maps?

For the moment, this only works on coordinates in the United States, as Yahoo Maps has yet to implement other parts of the world (this is hopefully coming soon).

Why not use Google?

Currently this extension only supports Yahoo! Maps. The intent is to support multiple mapping providers including Google, but to date only Yahoo! has a terms of use that allow for non-webapplication use. Google explicity prohibits such use right now. They were contacted by me in mid December about this extension, but to date have not replied with permission to include their service. While it may in theory be ok
to do considering Firefox is a web browser, and we are not doing anything harmful or commercially, I don’t wish to get into any trouble, it’s their API, and I respect that. Perhaps someone from Google Local will contact me about this. I’d love to add in support for it (would be great for international use).

Where can I get it?

For now you can get it here. I need to setup a project page at mozdev at some point. This is a 0.1 release, so there are still bugs.

6 replies on “Introducing GeoLocateFox”

Manuzhai, that’s because he’s using geotags. Instead of searching for ICBM in the source, check for geo.placename (to find that robert’s based in New Jersey).

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