Yup it’s here!

On Monday, 14th the Automatic Update (AU) feature of Windows Update (WU) started to offer users of Internet Explorer 9 Beta an upgrade to the Internet Explorer 9 Release Candidate.

This rollout started with a narrow audience and expanded over the coming days to cover all Internet Explorer 9 Beta users. I’m late brining the news I know but I bet most of you just wait for the windows update system to offer the new updates to you as and when they go live, however if you go to http://windows.microsoft.com/ie9 you can grab your very own copy of the Release Candidate and get ahead of the rest!

As some of you know I design websites and need/like to keep up to date on the latest, Andy Zeigler, Program Manager has just announced (as I write this actually) another cool feature for IE9, it supports the W3C Geolocation API.

This is what he has said:

IE9 RC includes support for the W3C Geolocation API, which enables Web developers to request the user’s physical location. This capability is useful for many Web sites, especially those that are already location-aware. For example, mapping services can now center the map based on where you actually are. Sites that let you check in can recommend nearby places. Local search can work more reliability.

Internet Explorer respects your privacy. With your permission, Web sites can obtain your approximate latitude and longitude by calling one of the W3C Geolocation API methods. If a Web site requests your location, Internet Explorer will notify you and let you choose whether or not to grant the requesting Web site access to your location. You can allow or deny the Web site access to your location once, or you can always allow or deny by clicking on the “Options for this site” button. At any time, you can clear the list of sites you have allowed or denied access to on the Privacy tab in Tools->Internet Options. On that tab, you can also turn off geolocation and prevent any Web site from requesting your location.

If you allow, Internet Explorer will approximate your location with the help of the Microsoft Location Service and works without the need for additional hardware. Given an IP address or a list of nearby WiFi hotspots, it can approximate your physical location using a database of IP addresses and a database of known hotspot locations.

You can try out this capability on the IE9 Test Drive site. Just click “locate me,” approve the prompt, and check out the result. If you zoom out, you can see the error radius that is returned by the API. You’ll notice that location requests with WiFi data are more accurate than those based just on IP address.

You can check out the Geolocation Demo on the IE Test Drive site.
Why this is quite interesting is because a number of members here have suggested to me that a map type system of the members locations would be a great way to work out who lives closer to who and maybe arrange for a meet up, with support for geolocation I could maybe code up a plug-in for vBulletin that collects your location and maps it out on a Google map or something like that...just thinking out loud really.

Anyway, if you’re interested go grab the RC and let me know what you think of IE9.

Lee