You’ve arrived in a new city, a new continent, a new coffee shop. You don’t really know where you are, and are looking for a good place to eat. You pull out your laptop, fire up Firefox, and go to your favorite review site. It automatically deduces your location, and serves up some delicious suggestions a couple blocks away and plots directions there.

It sounds to me a lot like what people had hoped Google would do with their Android phones, except Mozilla here isn’t talking about ad space yet. 

How can this be done?  It is in part thanks to the new W3C Geolocation Specification which, in turn, adds the ability for web sites to request and users to provide their locations.  It would/could be done a number of different ways such as GPS, WiFi, entering the details yourself, and so on.

If this tickles your fancy, you can download the Geode add-on for Firefox or just check out Mozilla Labs for more of the inside dirt on the idea.