jsdelivr.com is much more reliable (Multi-CDN, Multi-DNS). Comparison: https://www.jsdelivr.com/unpkg
I am not affiliated in anyway to jsdeliver or unpkg. I simply used to be a user on unpkg.
As noted in the intent to ship for both, these are a very specific narrow cases chipped off a bunch broader attempt to offer declarative ways to handle permissions in general, a <permission> element.
Intent-to-ship for geolocation: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/g/blink-dev/c/GL0Bk...
Earlier Page-Embedded Permissions Control (PEPC) proposal: https://github.com/WICG/proposals/issues/113 https://github.com/andypaicu/PEPC/blob/main/explainer.md
The root problem is that permissions right now are super hard to adjust for users (and the way they are exposed to the page is not very good at dealing with users turning permissions on and off either). It's imo very good that we are finally leaving this awful tarpit of design, & moving towards permissions being more fluid. I get that other browsers wanted to be conservative & not do a generic <permission> element, but given how big an improvement this feels like, I sort of wish it'd gotten the pass.
If clicking on it does trigger a location permission prompt: what's the point? The "issues" with prompts getting denied can already be solved by web developers doing this themselves, rather than just blindly firing off a request on page load.
If clicking on it does not trigger a location permission prompt: have we forgotten about the Line Of Death [0]? Clicking random website-styled elements should never result in dangerous actions being taken - and leaking the user's physical location is definitely dangerous. Sure, they are trying to restrict the styling, but that's a fools' errant: somebody will just make a browser game where the button looks to refer to something ingame, but actually leak your real-world location.
Besides, who's actually asking for this? Location is perhaps useful for Google Maps-like websites to save you a few seconds of scrolling, but in practice it has mostly been spammy websites trying to get me to "subscribe to local news". Making geolocation easier is the last thing I want in my browser!
[0]: https://textslashplain.com/2017/01/14/the-line-of-death/
Does that mean identifying the browser and trying to tell the user how to go into the browser settings and un-block permission prompts?
Using geolocation on the web is not something I do daily, but I do use it every now and then. The "locate stores near me" button for looking up store closing times is a lot easier than manually panning across a map.
I find Chrome's current implementation (on Android) to be acceptable as long as measures are taken to prevent clickjacking and such to automate repeating prompts after denying permissions. I expect other browsers like Firefox to be more conservative in showing popups like that.
The original flow is awkward, but also renders the permission element in a location that can't be clickjacked, thus offering some protection from geolocation.
I've had to deal with plenty of people who couldn't do things like use Jitsi or other web apps because they missed or denied the permission prompt before reading them. The tiny icons in the address bar are barely recognised as clickable items by most users, which is a good thing for toning down annoyances but an awful inconvenience when trying to help people.
In a few cases, the solution to "accidentally dismissed permission popup" was "make everyone else download an app full of trackers".
Geolocation based on IP address is always done in the background, so they already know what city you are from. But Google wants to have the nice high-precision location from our GPS chips so they can permanently associate the IP address, and available WIFIs/Bluetooth/network devices and all related MAC addresses to a specific building.
And they want to have this specific functionality so they can organically trick non-power-users who got accustomed to the permission popup dialogs into re-sharing their location.
> If a prompt appears unexpectedly, users may block it reflexively or accidentally, unaware that this decision creates a permanent block that is difficult to reverse. This context gap—rather than the feature itself—is a primary driver of high denial rates.
> If a user previously blocked location access when browsing a site (perhaps by accident or lack of context), clicking the element triggers a specialized recovery flow. This helps them re-enable location at the moment when they actually want to use location, without the friction of navigating deep into the browser's site settings.
Google sees "high denial rates" when they try ask users for their geolocation. This is a problem for Google's customers, the advertisers. So they introduce this <geolocation> HTML tag so that dark patterns can be employed to trick users into permanently sharing location even though they have blocked location sharing before.
If the Google engineers who are working on this feature would actually give a damn about users who decided to block geolocation access, this feature would be designed as a "temporary access to geolocation for duration of browser session".
So basically it is all about more tracking and less data privacy.
It's overdue that skilled engineers provide better solutions than this crap, but of course it's much easier to be apolitical and become a millionaire working for a bunch of tech bros who visited Epstein's island.
Also I’m not sure about the argument of context disconnect. Properly designed websites will only ask for (and prompt the location permission modal) when it really needs it.
> Zoom reported a 46.9% decrease in camera or microphone capture errors
But I have no doubt there is a play happening here.
Probably it will change over time to make gathering data easier?
Or something else that makes Google money.
Edit: this has prompted me to go find a way to turn off location permission requests in the browser settings. It turns out you can do it under Privacy and Security > Site Settings in Firefox and Chrome.
Most browsers allow setting default permissions for all sites at once.
troupo•1h ago
- scribble on a napkin (explainer)
- ask others for their position
- ship regardless of position or any outstanding issues
- claim it's a new standard
breakingcups•1h ago
troupo•1h ago