Geolocation stopped working recently in chromium

[Olivier Tilloy]

At some point during the month of July 2018, the geolocation service stopped working in all ubuntu versions of chromium (I'm currently testing on the latest stable, 68.0.3440.75).

This can be observed by browsing to https://html5demos.com/geo, authorizing the browser to access the position information when prompted, and observing that the page consistently fails to find the location.

The same issue has been reported for ArchLinux packages: https://groups.google.com/a/chromium.org/forum/?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer#!msg/chromium-packagers/1LDZZnYJ0SU/OCCtVl78BQAJ.

It appears Google now requires API key owners to enable billing (despite the fact that geolocation is supposedly a free service), and this hasn't been done for the API key used in Ubuntu packages.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

I can confirm the quotas have been reduced to 1 free request per day as a result of not enabling billing. See attached screenshot from the google administration console.

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

And here is the official documentation regarding geolocation API and billing: https://developers.google.com/maps/documentation/geolocation/usage-and-billing?hl=en_GB

[Olivier Tilloy (osomon)]

This is now fixed, the folks at google were kind enough to bump our geolocation API quotas without billing enabled.