With the latest shenanigans coming out of Mozilla, I want to explore other browsers - I've tried both Zen and Brave, and both give me errors when trying to determine my location. Google Maps on Brave gives me a location that's a good 10-20km away from where I actually am, and on Zen it straight up tells me that my location cannot be determined. Zen browser at least asks me to give access to my location, but still doesn't seem able to find me.
Firefox, on the other hand, is working flawlessly.
If you installed Brave as a Flatpak package (should be the default in the Software store) you most likely need to grant it additional permissions. I'm not sure this is the case but it's worth a try. First run this in a terminal window:
flatpak list
This should return a list of all packages installed using this format. If you see "com.brave.Browser" listed, then it's a Flatpak.
You can then install something called "Flatseal" from the Software store. This can be used to allow permissions to certain packages as needed. For location, I'm not sure of the exact setting but probably under Portals -> Location.
As for Zen Browser, remember that it's still in Beta version which is to say that it's under heavy development and some features may be missing. I'd suggest you raise this issue in their bug tracker:
Brave was installed as a flatpak, and using Flatseal, I've toggled the location under Portals, but still no luck.
I'm aware that Zen is still in active development, but it's weird that both browsers fail to get my location.
I've since installed Vivaldi and Edge (for work - don't judge me!) and both of these give me the same error as Zen which is "your precise location could not be determined" - at least Brave has the correct city!
Chrome Based Browsers are built on Google Chromium. So, Google baked Google into it.
Chromium-based browsers like Chrome, Edge, and Vivaldi rely on Google's geolocation services, which now require an API key. Without it, location data may be inaccurate or not work at all.
Firefox Uses Mozilla’s Location Service: Mozilla Location Service (MLS), which gathers Wi-Fi and cell tower data, often providing more accurate results.
Turning WiFi scanning on may help Chromium based browsers:
nmcli radio wifi on
To try to enable MLS in chrome, in the address bar, enter the flags
-For chromium based browsers chrome://flags
-Vivaldi gotta be different vivaldi://flags
Search for and enable:
enable-experimental-web-platform-feature
Once this is done... you need a Google API key. To get one, you must go here:
Start a new project, then enable geolocation API, then generate a key.
Grab it, then adjust chrome Exec in its .desktop file to be (Change apikey to the actual APIKEY you grabbed above. Change google-chrome to vivaldi or brave as needed...) google-chrome --enable-features=UseGoogleLocationService --force-enable-location=1 --enable-geolocation=1 --google-geolocation-api-key=APIKEY
