Brad Stone of the NY Times covers the new “browser wars”: IE vs. Firefox and Safari. While the numbers differ, in Europe the Firefox market share is north of 35% and in some countries north of 40%, while in the US it’s about 21%.
One of the things I’ve written about in the past, which could be done to improve location awareness on the desktop, is to embed WiFi triangulation into new versions of the browser itself. It could also be done in the toolbar (i.e., Loki). It would seem a relatively easy thing to do technically (per discussions with Skyhook Wireless’ Ted Morgan). It would also be a differentiating feature for the browser that implemented location awareness.
The Loki toolbar is already a Firefox add-on, however this isn’t a mass-market scenario.
Once you have more precise location awareness you have demographic targeting by zip or neighborhood and you have the ability to tailor messaging to geography (store specials, local store information, etc.). Search results can become much more “personalized” by geography accordingly.
Screenwerk 
May 26, 2008 at 11:11 pm
You might be interested that Aza Raskin, of Mozilla, is thinking about geolocation in the browser.
http://azarask.in/blog/post/firefox-geolocation-js-library/
http://azarask.in/blog/post/geolocation-in-firefox-and-beyond/
May 26, 2008 at 11:46 pm
That’s good.
June 30, 2008 at 1:38 pm
[…] equally make their way into laptop hardware eventually. Skyhook has also been working on trying to get location into the browser, something that Mozilla is interested in for future versions of […]
September 2, 2008 at 10:30 am
[…] be later this morning — on a global basis. One of the questions in my mind is whether the browser incorporates location in some […]