Google has updated its open-source Gears project so websites can take advantage of location services in Gears-enabled web browsers.
The underlying technology, which used signals from mobile-phone towers, was initially developed so mobile-phone users could get a rough fix on their location, even without GPS technology. Now, however, Gears has been augmented with location smarts based on signals from Wi-Fi networks so people with laptops can also calculate their location to within about 200 metres in many major cities.
That means a website that might benefit from showing a person's location — most mapping-related sites, for example — can be more personalised, as long as there are wireless network signals around. Google uses Gears to try to advance the web application state of the art, but only a small fraction of users have it installed.
In addition, programmers don't need to know which underlying mechanism provides the service. "Because the geo-location API is the same for developers in both desktop and mobile browsers, you can even use the same code on both platforms," Charles Wiles, product manager of the Google mobile team, said in the Google Code blog post on Tuesday.
Gears is an extension that augments the ability of Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Google Chrome and Apple Safari. But it's not the only way to get geographic information into a browser.
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Two weeks ago, Mozilla released a Firefox plug-in called Geode that uses a similar Wi-Fi technology, from Skyhook Wireless, to give a user's location. That service is also being built into Firefox 3.1, and will eventually be able to use other methods, including GPS, to retrieve location information.
Sharing one's location information with websites raises inevitable privacy concerns but, as with Mozilla's Firefox extension, those sites must obtain explicit information. "Gears will always tell a user when [a] site wants to access their location for the first time, and the user can either allow or deny [the site's] permission," Wiles said.
The Wi-Fi location feature has also been built into the BlackBerry version of Google Maps for Mobile, according to Google's Mobile blog.
"The premise is similar to what we do with [mobile] tower information: information transmitted by nearby Wi-Fi access points is used to pinpoint your location," said Adel Youssef and Arunesh Mishra, programmers for Google mobile. "Since the range of a Wi-Fi access point is smaller than that of a [mobile] phone tower, this often results in a much more accurate position."
