Us bloggers as a group can be incredibly dense sometimes. Case in point: the iPhone’s Safari browser will support geolocation in the very near future. But here comes the ‘bloggers are dense’ part: remember when Google announced Latitude for the iPhone will be built in the browser rather than as a standalone app? Yeah, that really should have been a tip off to most of us that Safari would support geolocation, but remarkably no one noticed until today (except for this guy who noticed nearly 2 months before everyone else!).
Computerworld’s Seth Weintraub tested out the latest beta Safari browser build this morning on a GPS-enabled webpage created my Mozilla and, as you’ve probably gathered by now, it found his GPS coordinates before returning a result.
It isn’t a terrifically huge surprise that Safari will support geolocation. After all, Mozilla’s Firefox will fully implement it into its next build; Opera recently announced support; and, Webkit, which provides the basis for the Safari browsers and Google Chrome will also implement geolocation in the future. All of these browsers will support the World Wide Web Consortium’s Geolocation API specification, which hasn’t been finalized yet, but signifies the growing importance of location on the web in general, rather than just from a mobile perspective.
I’m sure it’ll take some time to work all of the bugs out, but I’m looking forward to a day when I don’t have to specify my location on a map or type in my postal code to filter a search by location. In the meantime, you can make your website location-ready with Skyhook’s Loki plug-in.