Geolocation not working on Safari 5.x on Windows 7/XP

Question

I am working on an app that uses the W3C standard geolocation API but I cannot for the life of me get it to work on Safari on my Windows 7 and XP PC. It works fine on my iPad and my iPhone. It also works perfect on Chrome (5, 6, 7 and the Canary build) and on Firefox (3.6). I don't have a Mac so I can't test it on that. IE doesn't support geolocation yet so that's covered too.

I created a stripped down version and I am hosting it on the Google Apps Engine so you can have a look at the code: http://html5-geolocator.appspot.com/ . All the (simplified) javascript is in the html so you should be able to right-click and debug/view source.

It is pretty much a straight conversion of the examples on the Google Map API DevGuide. Interestingly enough, the examples that Google is hosting are also NOT WORKING in Safari 5.0.x on Windows 7 (but they work fine on all those other platforms, same as my app), for example http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/javascript/examples/map-geolocation.html exhibits exactly the same issue as my APP, no map appears, the webpage just stays grey.

Through some debugging (alert("I am here") :-) it seems that in Safari, it does execute navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(myCallback), but it never seems to reach myCallback ... as if it never returns from getCurrentPosition. I have also seen that if I leave the browser window open overnight, when I get back to it in the morning the alert and map have appeared (though not always). I also tried added a errorCallback navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(myCallback, errorCallback) but it also never executes that, again suggesting it never returns from the getCurrentPosition call.

Why this happens?

EDIT: Just did some more testing, I added the timeout option (navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(myCallback, errorCallback, {timeout: 5000});) , and indeed it it timing out all the time, no matter how high I set it so it is never returning from the Google geolocation service, but why?

Answer 1

Try turning on your wi-fi. It appears that Safari relies on the wi-fi connection to work. I was having exactly the same issues, turned my wi-fi connection on and it work perfectly.

I'm now looking at how to detect this - will update if I find a solution