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Is There a Way to Manually Control Location Privacy for Weather in Firefox?
Take Control of Your Location Data in Firefox
Mozilla has introduced a privacy-focused update to the weather widget on Firefox’s New Tab Page. This feature gives you explicit control over whether the browser can use your location to provide weather forecasts. By default, this opt-in prompt is only active for users in the European Union and certain other regions.
This guide explains how the feature works and provides step-by-step instructions to manually enable it in any country, ensuring you have full authority over your location data.
How the Location Opt-In Feature Works
When this privacy feature is active, the weather widget will no longer automatically detect your location upon opening a new tab. Instead, a small notification will appear, asking for your permission to access this data.
You are presented with two choices:
- Yes: Allows the weather widget to detect and use your current location.
- Not now: Prevents the widget from accessing your location information.
This workflow ensures that your location data is shared only with your explicit consent, giving you direct control over the browser’s functionality.
Manually Enable Location Control in Any Region
If this feature is not yet available in your region, you can enable it by modifying an advanced setting within Firefox. This requires accessing the about:config page, which contains experimental and sensitive settings. Proceed with caution.
- Open Firefox and type about:config into the address bar, then press Enter. A warning message will appear. Click “Accept the Risk and Continue” to proceed.
- In the search bar at the top of the page, type showWeatherOptIn and wait for the results to filter.
- Locate the preference named browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.system.showWeatherOptIn. Its value will likely be set to false.
- To enable the opt-in prompt, change this preference’s value to true. You can do this by double-clicking the preference or by clicking the toggle icon on the far right. The change takes effect immediately without a browser restart.
After completing these steps, open a new tab. The weather widget will now display the permission prompt, allowing you to click “Not now” to block automatic location detection. You can then use the 3-dot menu on the widget to set a manual location if you still wish to see a forecast.
Reverting Changes and Advanced Details
You can reverse this change at any time. To restore automatic location detection, either set the browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.system.showWeatherOptIn preference back to false or select “Detect my location” from the weather widget’s 3-dot menu.
For advanced users, interacting with the opt-in prompt modifies the following preferences, which store your choice:
- browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.weather.optInAccepted: Set to true if you click “Yes” and false if you click “Not now.”
- browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.weather.optInDisplayed: Set to true once you have interacted with the prompt.
Enabling this consent feature also automatically sets browser.newtabpage.activity-stream.weather.staticData.enabled to false, disabling the collection of non-personalized weather data.