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

Update 9/2/2010: I heard from Adrian Bateman, Microsoft's Program Manager for Internet Explorer, on the W3C Geolocation mailing list:

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.

So, not good news, but I'm holding out hope! A few other members on the list had points on Microsoft's ability to implement Geolocation.

I pulled down the latest IE9 platform preview yesterday to check its support for the W3C Geolocation API.

Unfortunately, it doesn't appear to be supported yet. I've seen rumors that it may be supported, but I'm not sure how to confirm.

In the mean time, I built a little application that will tell you if your browser supports W3C Geolocation and attempt to Geolocate you: http://www.andypemberton.com/geo/