Google Maps geolocation API

Google have had an API to get the user’s location for a while (via the Google loader), but I didn’t think it was very good. But now there are two new methods of figuring out the user’s location, one using the new W3C standard and the other using Google Gears. The good news is they seem to do a very good job of locating the user (scarily so in fact), the bad news is that neither are supported by Internet Explorer or Safari.

Google Chrome uses Google Gears to do the job, FireFox uses the W3C method and frankly I’m not too bothered what Opera supports, since so few people use it.

One annoyance is the prompting you get in the browser, although this is fairly understandable since this information could potentially be used for evil. And it won’t be an especially useful feature until it’s adopted by more browsers. But a combination of all three methods may produce a reasonable compromise.