I was extremely interested to see what Mozilla would announce for the Geode project, and the result is surprisingly simple, yet incredibly powerful.
Now I can imagine a world where one commutes into work, pulls out their laptop, starts up Firefox and it notices that you are at your office so goes about setting your ‘Work’ profile into action: change homepage to company intranet, alter your bookmarks toolbar to the ‘Work’ bookmarks toolbar, enables that rubbish toolbar extension they keep on insisting you use, the list could go on.
After a hard days slog, you go back home, start up Firefox and it changes your homepage back to Facebook, puts your ‘home’ bookmarks toolbar back, and finally disables that ridiculous toolbar from work.

Next day we get on a plane, arrive at a new city and check into the hotel. We log into the hotel wifi, start up Firefox and it recognises that this location is not one of your saved profile places. All of a sudden I am being offered up possible websites to visit for food, entertainment, local travel, weather etc. I spend an hour or so getting familiar with the city and planning the next few days.

Couple of quick examples, but you get the idea.

Location, Location, Location is *not* just about mobiles. Getting information when you are out and about is different to when you are away from the house. No matter how well implemented mobile Safari is or Fennec turns out to be, they will not be able to beat the experience of sitting at a cafe, in a hotel or round a friends house with a laptop and getting a richer experience (you can argue until you are blue in the face; 3.5″ of touchscreen is never going to be as rich as 15″ of macbook pro, period).

I look forward to seeing how this progresses, and hope that a geolocation API is available to addon developers in the near future, not just webstes.

In terms of Minimap, this doesn’t mark the end. Minimap is very much about location in web pages, Mozilla’s offering is about the location of you. I see very little function overlap at present, if anything this can only help to make Minimap better once I hook into Firefox’s locating abilities.

Big congrats to the team for developing this.