HTML5 offline mode and geolocation

Question

Is it possible to still use the geolocation features when you are in offline mode in HTML5? It appears that when I am online (navigator.onLine = true), the geolocation works fine. But when I go offline (navigator.onLine = false), I get thrown to my error callback and the error indicates geolocation not available.

Answer 1

It's going to depend on how the GeoLocation in that particular browser is wired up. In Firefox, GeoLocation depends on Google Location Services which works by sending some network information to a web service - obviously this is not going to work when you're offline as the web service will not be available.

If you had a browser which communicated directly with GPS hardware then it would work offline, but I don't think you'll find any desktop browsers with that sort of integration - maybe some mobile ones will.