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Comment by jason-phillips | Hacker News Reader

The point is not that one makes available one's site for free. The point is that the quality of the work is sloppy, price of said service notwithstanding.

There are many other ways to approximate a client's geolocation so as to prevent displaying an embarrassing error where one did not first check whether the object's property was truthy or not.

Justifying terrible UX by saying, "it's free," is a terrible strategy, tbh. Free shit is still shit.

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It's not just that the key isn't populated; it's that it's undefined. FWIW, my browser (Chrome) works on the site even if I choose not to share geolocation; I assume because the API is populated even if it then refrains from sharing.

Your point isn't quite wrong but it also isn't quite right; geolocation is supported by every browser listed on Mozilla's documentation (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/g...) so if a browser isn't at least stubbing out that API these days, it's not w3c-compliant, and non-w3c-compliant browsers will sometimes just break on some pages.

It is, of course, still incumbent on the developer to go that extra mile if they want to catch that last 1% of users, but users of exotic browsers get an exotic experience also.

None of the browsers on my iPhone will render this site, W3C compliant or not.

In any event, I would never tell my users that it's their fault that my app didn't check the truthiness of the object's property. Seems particularly hostile to one's users and customers, free product or not.

Ever written a website that checks whether `window` is defined?

Technically, we should be checking everything.

Practically, nobody does.

That's a monopoly problem, no? Apple doesn't actually let you use different browsers. You should try it on an android phone?

FYI: renders on iPad with iPadOS 16.1 (iPad so no GPS). Either way, you are coming across to me as somewhat petulant - you could be right but politeness has its place too.

> (iPad so no GPS)

That's WiFi only iPads - the iPads with 3G/4G comms used to have GPS, at least the 2011 iPad2 did.

Probably still do, my current cheap Android tablet with 4G does.

If you aren't paying the bills you aren't a customer. You are a recipient of a gift who is lecturing the creator on workmanship.

You could of course offer the site's author some friendly advice on how to fix this rather than throwing a tantrum and making accusations about sloppy work and user hostility. Your comments aren't a great look.

That link also says:

Secure context: This feature is available only in secure contexts (HTTPS), in some or all supporting browsers.

So perhaps the site isn't being loaded over HTTPS? If that's the case, it sounds like a site bug.

Here’s a blog post by the author of the app for more insight into the amount of work and details put into it.

https://james.darpinian.com/blog/how-see-a-satellite-tonight...

But, all moral posturing notwithstanding, is it not also true that if the OP just gets a browser or a browser version or a browser configuration that supports geolocation that they will be back in business?

Uh, then don't use it? Problem solved methinks.

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