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Mozilla Labs has announced the availability of Geode, an experimental Firefox extension that brings location awareness to the popular open source browser. The purpose of Geode is to let websites figure out a person’s approximate geographic location – as long as you grant the software permission to access the information – and use it to provide personalized, localized content.

The location detection technology in the Geode extension is built on top of Skyhook's Loki platform, which attempts to determine the user’s location by comparing nearby Wi-Fi access points against a global reference database. Mozilla says that the new feature will be built directly into Firefox 3.1 when it's released.

Although this technology doesn't seem particularly interesting on the desktop, it could prove useful for mobile users as location aware web applications become more commonplace. You can download Geode from Mozilla, and test it with a demo web application called Food Finder.