The latest versions of Firefox and Google Chrome support location-aware browsing, enabling websites to use the geo-location of the user to provide them relevant and localized content. Although both browsers claim to keep your privacy intact by revealing as little information possible, some of you might want to tweak the settings to either enable / disable the feature completely.

By default, the location-aware browsing feature is partially enabled in both the browsers. Meaning, it’ll ask for user’s permission when a website requests their geo-location. You can set the preferences like so.

Mozilla Firefox (v. 3.5+)

Undo a geo-location permission granted to a website

• Go to the website you have already granted the geo-location permission.
• Go to ‘Tools’ > ‘Page Info’.
• Click ‘Permissions’ tab.
• In ‘Share Location’, uncheck ‘Always ask’ and set it to ‘Blocked’.

Disabling the location-aware browsing feature completely

• In the address-bar, type ‘about:config’.
• In the ‘Filter’ box, type ‘geo.enabled’.
• Now double-click the ‘geo.enabled’ entry to make it ‘false’.

To enable it back again, toggle the above settings.

Google Chrome (v. 5+)

• In Google Chrome, click the Tools icon > Options.
• Click ‘Under the hood’ tab > ‘Content Settings…’ button.
• In the small window that appears, click the ‘Location’ tab.
• To disable the feature completely, select the third option – ‘Do not allow any site to track my physical location’.



• Close all configuration windows.

Of course these settings can be changed as and when required in both browsers.

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