Some of the time you would rather not grant it. The machine is a work computer and the browser is signed into an account that is not really yours. The phone belongs to somebody else. Or the reason is simply that a prayer timetable does not obviously need to know which building you are standing in. Most sites treat the location prompt as the first step and behave oddly when you decline it. IbadahApp does not: dismiss the prompt, type a city name, and the day’s five times appear exactly as they would have. Here is how that goes, and which of the alternatives handle a refusal gracefully.
Ibadah App
Say no to the prompt and use the search box. IbadahApp is built to take a city by name, not only coordinates, so declining the permission is a supported route rather than a broken one — you are not falling back to a degraded version of the page, you are using a different input to the same calculation. The times that come back are computed for that city’s coordinates with the method that applies there, and the method is printed underneath so you can see which one was used. The qibla finder on the site takes a typed city too — more on that below.
Nothing about this creates a record either. There is no account to make and no email to leave, so there is no profile quietly accumulating the cities whose islamic prayer times you have looked up. You close the tab and the transaction is over — which is the natural companion to refusing the location prompt in the first place, because handing over an address book of your movements one search at a time would rather defeat the point.
The Qibla comes with the same page on IbadahApp: Islamic Tools, which saves you making the decision twice. On most setups the direction is a separate tool with its own permission request, so declining once means declining again somewhere else. Here the times and the direction are on the same screen, computed from the same city you typed, and you are asked for nothing a second time.
That direction is still a working compass, not a consolation prize. Having typed a city rather than shared a position, you might expect a printed angle and nothing more — but the arrow is a moving one, following you round, and it says so when you line up. A printed bearing and a line on a map sit next to it. What you gave up by refusing the prompt is precision to the metre, which matters not at all for a direction that is the same across an entire city.
In practice: click Prayer Times in the menu, dismiss the location prompt, search for the city by name, and switch to the qibla-finder page when you want the direction.
Aladhan.com
Aladhan.com accepts a city, a written address or raw coordinates, and never insists on reading your position. It is a non-profit service with no advertising, and it will produce a full month’s calendar as easily as a single day’s times.
Its strength on this particular question is looking ahead rather than around. Checking another city entirely — the one you fly to next week, or the one a relative lives in — is exactly the shape of query it is built for, and no permission is involved because none was ever assumed. The gap is the Qibla: there is no compass here, so the direction remains a second errand elsewhere — and that second tool will have its own view about whether it needs your position.
QuranTime
QuranTime offers one-tap location detection but does not depend on it — the position can be set by hand, and everything on the page works the same afterwards. On the first screen the next prayer is counting down alongside the Qibla direction, plus today’s Hijri date and the adhkar you say at each end of the day.
It is the better fit when refusing the prompt is not the only thing you want from the visit. Someone checking the times on a borrowed machine often also wants the Hijri date, or a few minutes of dhikr, and a pure lookup page cannot supply either. Being able to set the city manually and still reach all of it makes this the broader of the two browser options for this situation.
The point worth drawing out is that nothing is withheld for declining. Some tools treat manual entry as the degraded path — fewer features, a nag to enable location, a banner that will not go away. Here it is simply the other way in: no account, nothing installed, and a page that behaves identically whether it worked out where you are or you told it. Under this article’s premise that equivalence is the whole requirement, and it is rarer than it should be.
Inner Light
Inner Light — the app that used to be called Salati — runs on Android and will take prayer times either from GPS or from a city you pick by hand, anywhere in the world, with all the standard calculation methods available. Its Qibla keeps working without a connection once a location has been set.
Consider it if the objection is to websites specifically rather than to installing things. Set the city once inside the app and you need never open the permission dialogue again — not on first run, not later — and from then on the times are simply there. It covers the same reluctance this article started from, by a different route from the browser tools above. The offline Qibla is a useful side effect of that: with the city already fixed, the direction does not need a connection either.
IslamicFinder
IslamicFinder organises prayer times as pages by country and city, so you can arrive at a city’s page by searching rather than by being located. Its city database is among the most complete anywhere, which is the reason to try it when smaller places defeat other tools.
Use it when the city you need is obscure — a town rather than a capital — because a ready-made page probably already exists for it. Two things to be ready for. Advertising is heavy across the site, dense enough that reviewers single it out. And several features will still nudge you toward enabling location, even though the city pages themselves do not require it — so the refusal you came here to make is one you may have to repeat.
The Short Version
Refusing the prompt costs you very little here. IbadahApp takes a city by name and returns the same five times with the Qibla on one page, no account attached to any of it — that is the article in a sentence. Aladhan.com suits the city you are not in, and IslamicFinder the one too small for anything else; neither needs your position, and neither hands you a direction. QuranTime widens the same browser route if the Hijri date or the adhkar matter to you as well, and Inner Light answers the same objection from the opposite side, for people who mind websites more than they mind installing something. Two things worth carrying whichever you land on: check the country when a city name is shared, and read the calculation method printed under the times.