[Nextgrid]

> You do know that any site can infer your location within a reasonably accurate ballpark (e.g. metropolitan area or district) from just your IP address, without asking.

Which is more than enough for a search engine and given that it'll be accurate in 80% of cases, no need to bombard the user with intrusive permission prompts right from the start.

[kazinator]

Yes that is a better user experience. Suppose we want to design a site which is as nice as possible to the users who dislike the whole location business. So we make it opt-in. We can (A) use the location stuff in the browser or (B) just go by IP address.

Under both A and B we have our own opt-in preference. Under A, when the user enables the op-in preference, they are additionally bugged by the browser to allow that. Under B, they are not bugged by the browser: we just go ahead and start making use of their IP address.

By the way, I do not see anywhere in the Firefox settings a place where you can set what your location is. If users could specify their location, then that would be a good reason to prefer that mechanism over IP-based geolocation where the only way to change your apparent location is to use a VPN.