Subject: [Geopriv] HELD in Firefox

From: "Richard L. Barnes" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 30 Jun 2010 14:50:18 -0400

An FYI on implementation:

The first pre-beta version of Firefox 4.0, released today, includes a  
minimal version of HELD, as a location provider for the W3C  
Geolocation API.  The profile of HELD implemented is as follows:
-- Requests have no <locationType>, but they do have a <measurements>  
object with a set of WiFi measurements
-- The only responses that are used are ones that contain a  
<gs:Circle>, representing a point with an uncertainty radius.
-- Civic addresses and location URIs are not used.

HELD is not enabled by defuault.  To use it:
1. Open about:config
2. Set geo.wifi.protocol = 1
3. Set geo.wifi.uri to the URI of a HELD server.  For testing, I have  
been using <http://geopriv.dreamhosters.com/cgi-bin/lis4.pl>, which  
proxies requests through to the Google location server.

Once this is set up, queries to the W3C Geolocation API should  
initiate a HELD query to the specified server.

You can download the pre-release builds here:
<http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/nightly/latest-trunk/>

Finally, of course, this being pre-beta software, there's a minor bug  
to fix.  Inside the 'components' directory for Firefox, find  
NetworkGeolocationProvider.js, and change line 354 from this:
             switch (this.protocol) {
to this:
             switch (protocol) {
Everything should of course work perfectly :)

--Richard