Random location detection, different between devices
 

I use the AA route planner and live traffic on the WWW, viewing in FF browser. On my phone, which obviously uses location permission and may fall back on GPS, WiFi or phone network info to figure out where it is the location detected is spot on. I also use a Samsung Android tablet with FF to visit the same website, selecting "use desktop site" in order to have the same look and feel. This device may be getting a fix from GPS although unlikely inside the house or from the WiFi network. It also gets a fairly good fix which improves after a page refresh or two. So far so good.
When I visit the same website from a Laptop running Linux Mint the location must be picked up from a purely WiFi source and is often wildly in error. This week, it thinks I am at Withernsea, on the spurn Peninsular. Most odd, I am about 50 miles away in Pickering, North Yorks.
I saw the same scale of error last week when in Reading, it thought I was near to Witney, Oxford, again about 40 miles away. It is most frustrating as it zooms the map to the wrong location, close up, and it takes a load of zoom out and pan/scroll actions to get to where I am. Every time I refresh the page to get updated traffic it jumps to the false location.

What is going wrong on the Laptop?

Ta.

Most laptops don't have GPS receivers, so they infer location by the IP address, which defaults to the location of the ISP, if they own the address space.

Also your Android devices will have better geolocation than Linux based purely on WiFi because Google uses other Android devices that do have GPS etc. to track the location of your WiFi access point.

Oh! Is there anything I can use to get the accuracy on the Unix Laptop?

Probably easiest to just buy a USB GPS receiver for your laptop, and install appropriate software.

In theory you could plug in a cheap USB GPS dongle to the laptop but I believe only Firefox on Linux knows how to query gpsd to get location from the dongle if you enable it. Linux Chromium based browsers had the feature at one point but Google removed it last I knew.

Thanks for info everyone. I just tried to use my Android phone to provide a bluetooth tether for the laptop but it makes no difference to the dodgy location detection. I didn't think it would but curiosity got to me.

If you want to use navigation with a similar accuracy as on a phone or tablet on your laptop, best thing would be to get a laptop with a GPS module. Not sure which ones have those, you'd have to search for that. A Bluetooth link to your phone does not include GPS data, it is mostly used as an internet access point and although your phone may be able to pinpoint its own location, the laptop will only get the (rough) location of the internet access point being used.
For a while, a new login on my laptop would be announced on my phone as 'Someone is trying to log in to your laptop in .....' with the part represented by the dots mentioning a city an hour's drive away. I knew it was me, but I can see how that can really confuse some people.

Something has changed. Previously I found that entering a location would take the map view directly to the place given, even to an abbreviated postcode but only for one shot. Next time the page was refreshed to get latest traffic situation it lost the postcode entry and jumped away to where it detected it was.

Today, I find the entering a postcode location stays set until another place is typed in so refreshing the page jumps back to where you are. Much better if you are looking for trends of traffic problems before setting out. Tomorrow we have to face the nightmare of the A64 ......... on a Friday ........ in the holiday season ........ again.

I had a quick look at this yesterday.

In my installation Firefox is already set to use geoclue for location, whereas support for gpsd was deprecated some time ago, thus it seems to me that if you were to configure geoclue to utilise GPS data from your telephone via rfcomm/bluez then you might get this working. Could be a bit of faffing around but, depending upon the degree of need, may be worth it?

I'd have given it a try, out of interest, except I don't use an Android based 'phone (nor iOS!)...

FP.