Geolocation not working (Firefox, Chromium)

[davydm]

I've noticed that geolocation doesn't work on either Firefox (64.0) (*) or chromium (71.0.3578.80) but does work in google-chrome (71.0.3578.9, which suggests that there's a USE flag that I'm missing for both locally-compiled browsers; however `equery u firefox` and `equery u chromium` don't seem to show any flags specific to geolocation.

What am I missing?

I need geolocation for the work I'm doing and I'd much rather not have google's binaries installed on my machine.

(*) specifically, the error handler for navigator.getCurrentPosition is invoked with the message "Unknown error acquiring position", which doesn't really narrow it down; and yes, I do allow location requests on the pages I'm testing on.

[bunder]

My understanding is that the location stuff in browsers works based on your external (if you're behind a router) ip address to find out what isp you're using, then make an educated guess about where you might be. Websites often get it wrong for me, sometimes up to 100km away.

edit: google does some shady stuff on android with gps and wifi access point scanning to map and triangulate a little more accurately, at the cost of privacy. not sure if they do the same thing on pc-based chrome.
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[davydm]

I'm quite sure you're right about the "how" of geolocation on desktop browsers.

TBH, for my current needs, I don't need it to be accurate -- I just need any sort of answer, since I'm developing against the user's current location. Google Chrome, for instance, reports me about 10km away from where I really am, but it's better than no answer at all. Although, for my users, I guess they'd like some semblance of accuracy: geolocation is used to determine which restaurants in our catalog are in their area, and hence, which restaurants they can order from. Obviously, with no result, we have no idea what restaurants to recommend to the user, so I get an empty list :/

Whilst I also accept that Google Chrome may just be doing super-dodgy stuff behind my back, if there is something I can do to fix this for other browsers, I'd still be interested (: