How to Turn Off Location Aware Browsing in Firefox for Android

When I was on a casual, relaxing trip in Cambodia last year and tried to find some news about my own city, I was being shown local results in Firefox that is installed in my Android smartphone. Although Firefox was doing its best job to show the local information by allowing websites to use the geo-location aware browsing, but it was irritating me terribly. For example, whenever I opened CNN, it would redirect me to their international website highlighting stories about Cambodia and Thailand. After three days of silently enduring the pain, I decided to do something about the matter at hand. After tinkering a little, I finally found a setting in the Firefox browser for Android that could effectively turn off the geo-location aware browsing.

If you are also going through a similar situation and want to turn off geo-location aware browsing in Firefox for Android, then you can follow these simple instructions:

  1. First of all, you will have to launch the Firefox browser in your Android smartphone or tablet. I am sure you already know how to do that, but I should still mention that you can tap on the Firefox icon in the All Apps section to launch it.
  2. When Firefox appears on your smartphone screen, tap once in the address bar and type about:config inside it. Then you can either tap Enter button in the Android virtual keyboard or tap on the icon in the address bar itself.Disable Firefox Location Aware Browsing in Android
  3. This would open a settings list in the Firefox browser (without showing any warning like Firefox does in the Windows or Linux versions). On this screen, type geo in the Search field and tap on the magnifying lens icon.
  4. This will show you a narrowed down list of all the settings that have anything to do with the word “geo”. You can scroll down and find a setting named geo.enabled. Then tap on the Toggle once to change its value from true to false.Disable Firefox Location Aware Browsing in Android
  5. That’s it. You have successfully disabled location aware web browsing in Firefox for Android.

At any later time, if you want to re-enable this feature again, then you can follow the above instructions once again, but with a little difference – this time you have to toggle the value of geo.enabled setting back to true.