HTMLGeolocationElement: permissionStatus property

Limited availability

This feature is not Baseline because it does not work in some of the most widely-used browsers.

Experimental: This is an experimental technology
Check the Browser compatibility table carefully before using this in production.

The permissionStatus read-only property of the HTMLGeolocationElement interface returns an enumerated value representing the current permission status for the geolocation feature.

If you want to access the initial permission status for the geolocation feature as it was when the page first loaded, use the initialPermissionStatus property.

Value

An enumerated value, which can be one of:

granted

The user has granted permission for the browser to use the geolocation feature, either via the <geolocation> element or some other mechanism. When using the <geolocation> element, this means that the user has pressed the rendered button and selected an "allow" option, at which point the browser will start to request location data.

denied

The user has denied permission for the browser to use the geolocation feature, either via the <geolocation> element or some other mechanism. When using the <geolocation> element, this means that the user has pressed the rendered button and selected a "don't allow" option, at which point the browser will not request location data until the user presses the rendered button again and selects an "allow" option.

prompt

The user has not specifically granted or denied permission for the browser to use the geolocation feature, which means that the browser won't request location data until they grant permission. When using the <geolocation> element, this means that the user has not yet pressed the rendered button. When they do, they'll be given the option to grant or deny permission for the browser to request location data.

The permission status persists between page loads. If the <geolocation> element has its autolocate attribute set to true, and permission was previously granted, the browser will start to request location data as soon as the <geolocation> element renders without requiring the user to press the button.

Examples

Basic usage

html

js
const geo = document.querySelector("geolocation");
console.log(geo.permissionStatus);
// "prompt" if this is the first time the user has accessed this page

Using permission status to inform the user

In our Embedded map example (source code), we add a promptaction event listener to the HTMLGeolocationElement object representing our <geolocation> element.

geo.addEventListener("promptaction", notifyUserGrantPermission);

In the referenced notifyUserGrantPermission() function, we use the permissionStatus property to check whether the permission status is denied or prompt and if so, we ask the user to press the button again and allow location. We don't need to ask this if they grant permission.

js
function notifyUserGrantPermission() {
  if (geo.permissionStatus === "denied" || geo.permissionStatus === "prompt") {
    statusElem.textContent =
      'Please press the "Use location" button again and allow location for this site.';
  }
}

See the main HTMLGeolocationElement page for a full walkthrough of this example.