Region

Firefox monitors the users region in order to show relevant local search engines and content. The region is tracked in 2 properties:

Region.current - The most recent location we detected for the user.

Region.home - Where we consider the users home location.

These are tracked separately as to avoid updating the users experience repeatedly as they travel for example. In general callers should use Region.home.

Region Updating

Firefox uses a location service that is provided by Mozilla. Firefox will attempt to check for region on first run of a new profile and every 7 days thereafter. If an update check fails, then the update will be retried after an hour for a maximum of three times.

If the user is detected in a current region that is not their home region for a continuous period (current 2 weeks) then their home region will be updated.

Testing

To set the users region for testing you can use:

let {Region} = ChromeUtils.importESModule("resource://gre/modules/Region.sys.mjs");
Region._setHomeRegion("US", false)

Setting the second parameter (notify) to true will send an notification that the region has changed and trigger a reload of search engines and other content.

Updating test_Region_geocoding.js data

Note: The geocoding feature is not turned on by default.

The test data used in this test is generated by running the MLS geocoding service locally:

Follow the Ichnaea location development guide @ https://ichnaea.readthedocs.io/en/latest/local_dev.html.

Make a list of test locations in a CSV format, for example:

7818724,38.0531587
7728138,38.0572369
6780180,48.5973431
7034801,48.5979913
6978640,48.5919751

You can use the MLS raw data files to get a large sample @ https://location.services.mozilla.com/downloads

Save a script to run the geocoding in ichnaea/ichnaea

import geocode
geocoder = geocode.Geocoder()

f = open("mls.csv", "r")
r = open("mls-lookup-results.csv", "a")

for x in f:
  [lat, long] = x.strip().split(",")
  region = geocoder.region(lat, long)
  r.write("%s\n" % region)

Run the script

$ make shell
$ cd ichnaea
$ python run.py

If you want to commit the new test data ~500 seems to be a reasonable number of data points to test before running into issues with the test length.