Update: IE9 Geolocation in February Release Candidate

As you may have heard, Microsoft dropped an official release candidate of IE9 over the weekend. Among many other improvements, they've incorporated an implementation of the W3C Geolocation API. You can get the IE9 release candidate at: http://windows.microsoft.com/ie9.

You may recall I wrote about this earlier in an earlier blog entry on Geolocation and heard from Microsoft that they had not announced support for Geolocation: We haven't announced support for the Geolocation API. As you're no doubt aware, in general we do not comment on if and when a particular feature might be part of a future product and I don't have any news to share on this particular topic.

I'm very excited about this news, especially given my conversation w/Microsoft and the feedback I added during the IE platform preview period! Here are a few screenshots of the implementation in progress, using the demo application I put together at http://www.andypemberton.com/geo

Following Taham Oddie's lead, here are a few Fiddler dumps of the HTTP traffic from my machine accessing Microsoft's Geolocation service at https://inference.location.live.net/inferenceservice/v21/Pox/GetLocationUsingFingerprint:

• https://gist.github.com/826285
• https://gist.github.com/826290

Along with the Google Toolbar for IE, which adds Geolocation support for IE8 and prior versions of IE, Geolocation is widely available on IE. (As I mentioned previously, all major versions of the other major browsers - Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Opera - already supported the API).

Also, of note, there was some interesting traffic on the W3C mailing list about issues with Microsoft's implementation in Time Zones other than the US:

The service is currently broken in a number of timezones (or so far, anything outside the US). It's just returning a 400 to the browser. - http://twitter.com/tathamoddie

To which Adrian Bateman replied:

Thanks for the report. We are aware of an issue with the service and are working on deploying the fix. - http://twitter.com/adrianba

I have to say, it's awesome to see this kind of collaboration and community involvement from Microsoft. Big thanks to Adrian Bateman and the rest of the folks on the IE team at Microsoft!

Regardless, I'm super excited about Geolocation and especially IE9's support. Prediction: I expect many CMS / WCM / eCommerce vendors and products to integrate and incorporate W3C Geolocation into their content targeting and personalization functionality in the next 2 years. It should get very interesting!