Let's replace warning with error for getCurrentPosition now that it no longer works.

I thought the same, but there's one caveat: an error will stop execution of all the code that follows (unless of course the exception is caught). That will break  scripts that are working now. It could be a disaster.

Not sure though, that *may* still be the right thing to do.

Anyway, all warnings MUST be crystal-clear about whether the attempted action has been prevented or not. This include improving the phrasing of the other warning I mentioned about asynchronous requests.

This will break Modernizrs feature detect for geolocation[1] which just does 'geolocation' in navigator to me if that's ran on an unsecure page it should be false as technically it doesn't support geolocation.

I assume this sets a precedent for future APIs to be moved to https only and those should return false for common feature detection techniques too.

[1] https://github.com/Modernizr/Modernizr/blob/master/feature-detects/geolocation.js

Simple repro page: http://jsbin.com/kafayu

I think the issue here is specific to the geolocation warning, it's not really "ambiguous" but actually "incorrect".  Geolocation on insecure origins is no longer "deprecated" it's fully "unsupported".  At a minimum the message should be updated to make that clear.  Joel, can you do that please?

We almost certainly can't change the API to throw an exception, that would be a breaking change.

I assume we could generate a devtools error message instead of a warning message, but I'm not sure that's appropriate.  It's no more a hard error than if the user had declined the permission.

Regarding the suggestion of changing feature detection, I don't think that's really appropriate.  In general browser features don't come and go depending on context.  This is really what the permissions API is for - you can determine in advance (albeit only asynchronously) that geolocation permission has been denied: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Permissions_API/Using_the_Permissions_API

I agree with #4. This is a bug in messaging, and if you look at getUserMedia(), which was deprecated and then removed in the same way as geolocation, we provide much more accurate messaging: "getUserMedia() no longer works on insecure origins. To use this feature, you should consider switching your application to a secure origin, such as HTTPS. See https://goo.gl/rStTGz for more details." I'll modify the geolocation message to match that.

I also agree with rbyers that this should not be an exception as that would semantically break many sites. From the application's perspective, his is treated indistinguishably from a user denying permission, so the case should already by handled.

The following revision refers to this bug:
  https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/f08d3200d37b28a9de02d28f7396e99966827551

commit f08d3200d37b28a9de02d28f7396e99966827551
Author: jww <jww@chromium.org>
Date: Fri May 06 19:35:17 2016

Fix geolocation removal from insecure contexts console message

The console message when the geolocation API is used in insecure
messages ambiguously says it is deprecated when, in fact, it has been
removed at this point. This updates the message to match getUserMedia()
and say it is removed.

BUG= 605938 
R=rbyers@chromium.org

Review-Url: https://codereview.chromium.org/1942003002
Cr-Commit-Position: refs/heads/master@{#392126}

[modify] https://crrev.com/f08d3200d37b28a9de02d28f7396e99966827551/third_party/WebKit/LayoutTests/http/tests/security/powerfulFeatureRestrictions/old-powerful-features-on-insecure-origin-expected.txt
[modify] https://crrev.com/f08d3200d37b28a9de02d28f7396e99966827551/third_party/WebKit/Source/core/frame/Deprecation.cpp
[modify] https://crrev.com/f08d3200d37b28a9de02d28f7396e99966827551/third_party/WebKit/Source/core/frame/UseCounter.h
[modify] https://crrev.com/f08d3200d37b28a9de02d28f7396e99966827551/third_party/WebKit/Source/modules/geolocation/Geolocation.cpp
[modify] https://crrev.com/f08d3200d37b28a9de02d28f7396e99966827551/tools/metrics/histograms/histograms.xml