Turn off the location awareness feature of Firefox 3.5 with this simple hack.

One of the many features of Firefox 3.5 is that it can be location-aware and by that what it means is, a website can be aware of your location of physically where you are. They figure out your location based on your IP address and the nearby wireless access point coordinates/information.

If you are concerned about your privacy and don’t want to share your physical location with anyone else you can disable the location-aware feature of Firefox 3.5 with this simple hack.

Launch Firefox 3.5 and type-in “about:config” at the Awesome/Address Bar and press Enter.

As usual, Firefox 3.5 tries to scare you with a warranty void prank message. Just click on the “I’ll be careful, I promise” button. If you don’t want to see this message again you can uncheck the “Show this warning next time” checkbox. If you don’t know what you are tinkering with Firefox 3.5 then you might want to read thru this message and be cautious as doing things erratic from now on will have severe consequences in your ability to use Firefox.

Once in the about:config page type-in “geo.enabled” at the Filter box. Firefox will filter the entries down to “geo.enabled” and you should be able to see that the location-aware feature is enabled by looking at the value being “true”.

Either double-click or right-click and choose “Toggle” to flip the value to “false“.

Once done, restart Firefox and you should now be least concerned about your privacy being exposed with the location-aware feature of Firefox 3.5.

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