Perhaps it could be better other way around. Start with GeoIP and add an "Improve Location" option. That way more people would enable it.

Most users will let the site use their device’s gps. Having the first step to be ”input your gps coordinates” would alienate a HUGE portion of the possible users.

"Enter your postal code" generally works about as well though.

The site's most important feature is Street View, and a postal code doesn't allow Street View to work. Neither does geoip.

I used to display only the 3D globe by default, with a gigantic bright green button to switch to street view. The majority of people never saw the Street View feature even though it was only one button press away. The button even had an animated effect to draw attention. If you also had to type in some text before seeing Street View, hardly anyone would bother.

I don’t have data backing this, but I can’t imagine the vast majority of people aren’t totally fine giving their location to a site like this if they’re interested.

Your way seems like it just adds a step and possible side effects like people thinking less of the site for not having their correct location or not seeing the improve location option after being turned off, etc.

It'd arguably be best to offer explicit choices to users:

* manually entered location

* IP address based geoip

* location permission

The site doesn't work at all for me, even if I give location permission. Because that's disabled in Firefox.

Those choices are all present, and the site works fine with location disabled. I test that.

OK, I navigate to the site in Firefox 60.3.0esr (64-bit) in Debian, and allow everything in NoScript. Then I see this:

> See Starlink

> Click to search for viewing times at your location.

So I click, and see a popup:

> Will you allow james.darpinian.com to access your location?

So I click on "Allow Location Access".

Then I see "Loading", with a GIF. But nothing ever loads.

Checking about:config, I see that NoScript likely added these:

> capability.policy.maonoscript.sites modified string [numerous domains]

> noscript.untrusted modified string [numerous domains]

I get the same result if I don't allow location access.

That's all I know offhand. But I'll be happy to check more carefully, if you like.

> Firefox 60

It's the old browser, not anything to do with your privacy settings. Sorry, when you decide to use an old and uncommon browser version the price you pay is that sites aren't going to be testing compatibility with it.

I had the same issue the first time I loaded the page on iOS 13.3 safari. Reloading the page fixed it. Having things be too automatic causes failures to be catastrophic rather than mild.

Yep, that was it.

It works perfectly in Firefox v71.0 :)

And a very cool sky view animation!

Come on, that's not much more than a year old.

> Firefox ESR

> October 23, 2018

Firefox 60 is from May 2018. It's 12 major versions behind. You may not like it, but it's a fact that web browsers change quickly these days. Mozilla may support ESR for a year but I don't. This is a side project and my test matrix is already too large; I don't have time to test uncommon versions of each browser.

OK, fair enough. And it is your site.

I'm just a little surprised that Firefox would have changed enough since last May to break your site.

And there's also the other tweaks I've made. For example, I don't allow WebGL or WebRTC. And I spoof referrer to a site's root. Plus other stuff that I don't recall offhand.

But anyway, now I'm curious, so I'll test in some otherf VMs, with different browsers.

The site doesn't work at all on the iPad I'm reading HN with right now, but I'm not complaining about it because it's running iOS 10.0.1. I expect lots of sites to not work correctly -- and they often don't!

I wasn't really complaining. I just mentioned it. And that was unnecessary, and distracted from my real point. I only mentioned it to explain why I couldn't see behavior after answering the popup about location permission.