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Make FAQ for setting default location for Courses in web app connect.garmin.com - anywhere but Olathe

Daksol
2 months ago

More a suggestion than a question.

Many people have had a problem when working with Courses via the Web app in a browser on a PC. The problem is that the map always starts up defaulted to Olathe, Kansas USA.

I eventually found a post on these forums which suggested I change the browser permissions for connect.garmin.com - allowing that website to access my PC's Location. I did this - and it now works as I would expect it to, starting up in the PC's location.

I made the change in Chrome on Windows, but would presume other browsers would behave similarly. Emphasising - this is a browser setting on your PC - not a setting wtihin the connect.garmin.com web app.

So suggestion - could this piece of info be added to the FAQ for the connect.garmin.com website, or otherwise publicised wider. A bunch of people have had the same problem, just search for "Olathe" to see quite a few.

  • 0 2 months ago

    Funnily enough, strava's Maps / route creator is able to show my approximate location without asking for permission, presumably by looking at the routes I usually run. (It shows a zoomed-out view of my city / personal heatmap.)

    Only when I press the crosshairs button to jump to my current location does the page ask for permission to access my location.

    Daksol said:
    I made the change in Chrome on Windows, but would presume other browsers would behave similarly. Emphasising - this is a browser setting on your PC - not a setting wtihin the connect.garmin.com web app.

    I think the problem here is that Chrome remembers your answer to the location permission question forever. So if you answered "no" / "Block" the first time, you won't be prompted again, and it won't be obvious in the future that the site wants to know your location.

    Firefox will ask you every time you visit the page, unless you check a box to have it remember your answer.

    Either way, as Strava shows, there's other ways for Garmin to figure out where you are. If they want to take the easy way out, they could just use the location of your last GPS-recorded activity.

    In Strava, I also noticed that if you do block the site's permission to access your location, the crosshairs button is disabled and when you hover over it, a tooltip says "Location not available."

    This means that the site absolutely knows that it doesn't have access to your location, and is able to communicate that information to the user.

    So besides creating a FAQ that many people won't read:

    - Connect could try a different way of determining your approximate location which doesn't require browser location permissions

    - If Connect detects that it doesn't have location permissions, it could display some sort of notice to that effect

    I also like the fact that Strava doesn't need your exact location (or ask for location permissions) unless you press the crosshair button which takes you to your exact location.

    Overall it's just a better user experience.

  • 0 2 months ago in reply to seilogramp

    Thanks for that. I have made the suggestion that the web page informs the user when the app is not granted access to the computer's location by the browser.

    I am sure Olathe is a nice place really,

  • 0 2 months ago in reply to FlowState

    To be clear I agree that this is an annoying problem and Garmin should fix it. I wasn't criticizing the suggestion, only the way Garmin has currently implemented things.

    I just wish they would put in the extra effort to fix this problem properly. Another alternative would be to use IP address geolocation to get an approximate location.

    https://onthegomap.com/ also shows my approximate location (city) without requesting my exact location from my browser (like Strava, it does have a button to jump to my exact location, which does require location permissions from the browser).

    My only point was that if other services can provide a decent UX around this stuff, so can Garmin.