Wednesday, April 6, 2022

[SOLVED] Unknown error acquiring position GeolocationPositionError code 2 - Firefox Linux Mint

Issue

Was trying to test geolocation function in my React project on Firefox 74.0 on Linux Mint 19.3.

When trying to execute the following code:

 window.navigator.geolocation.getCurrentPosition(
        position => console.log(position),
        err => console.log(err)
    );

The following error was shown in the Firefox browser console:

GeolocationPositionError { code: 2, message: "Unknown error acquiring position" }

Solution

About a year ago Google changed its policies, so now it requires a valid API key when accessing their geolocation service.

If you type in your Firefox address bar:

about:config

and search the following:

geo.provider.network.url

you will see that its value is set to 

https://www.googleapis.com/geolocation/v1/geolocate?key=%GOOGLE_LOCATION_SERVICE_API_KEY%

This tells us that you need a valid API key in place of %GOOGLE_LOCATION_SERVICE_API_KEY%

Until Mozilla solves this issue internally, the best solution is to change that value to:

https://location.services.mozilla.com/v1/geolocate?key=test



Note: This solution is best for testing. For production you can try ajax calls using either fetch or axios in React.



Answered By - Rezwan Azfar Haleem
Answer Checked By - Cary Denson (WPSolving Admin)
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