Mozilla plans to make a change to Geolocation in Firefox 55 that would block requests automatically if they come from non-secure origins.

Geolocation, broken down to its core, refers to technologies that allow sites and applications to determine a user's position in the world.

This can be useful when mapping services are used among other things (show me where I'm, auto-filling of the current location). Many sites, not only mapping services but also shopping sites, or multi-lingual sites, use Geolocation for functionality.

It is fairly common for instance that users are redirected automatically to a local version of the site if it exists.

Firefox 55: Geolocation requires secure origin

Mozilla plans to make the change in Firefox 55. The implementation is on the heels of the Chromium team which added the requirement to Chromium 50. Firefox 55 is scheduled for an August 2017 release.

Basically, what this means for Firefox users is that Geolocation requests won't work anymore if a site or application does not use HTTPS.

To be precise, Geolocation will also work in the context of encrypted WebSocket connections (wss://), and requests from local resources such as localhost.

Mozilla notes that services that use non-secure origins for Geolocation requests will break when the change happens. Telemetry data that has been analyzed five months ago suggests that this will affect about 0.188% of page loads in the browser.

Just looking at non-secure origin Geolocation requests, Telemetry data suggested that 57% of getCurrentPosition() requests and 2.48% of watchPosition() requests use non-secure origins.

The figure will go down further in the future as more and more sites start the migration to HTTPS.

If you run Firefox Nightly currently, which is at version 55 at the time of writing, you will notice that non-secure Geolocation requests still work.

The feature is hidden behind a preference right now which you need to set to false to test right away:

Type about:config in the browser's address bar and hit the Enter-key. Confirm that you will be careful. Search for geo.security.allowinsecure. Double-click on the preference to toggle it.

Once you have set the preference to false, any Geolocation request from an insecure origin will fail.

Now You: do you use sites that make use of Geolocation? (via Sören)

Summary Article Name Firefox 55: Geolocation requires secure origin Description Mozilla plans to make a change to Geolocation in Firefox 55 that would block requests automatically if they come from non-secure origins. Author Martin Brinkmann Publisher Ghacks Technology News Logo

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