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Ask HN: Why do websites ignore HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE?

10 points by decasteve ↗ HN
My browser sends 'en-US,en' for English. Yet many sites surreptitiously use a geo-ip lookup to decide what language I "should" be using.

I'm curious to know the pros and cons for this practice.

5 comments

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Piskvorrr
From stats ("site lang set by header and then changed by user"), most browsers are misconfigured (Everyone Is American, yay! Except those weird people who are not, oh well, let's send an accept-language of en-US anyway.)
junto
This is a personal pet hate of mine. As an English speaker in a non-English speaking country I have everything targeted at me in the wrong language.

What annoys me the most is that it is a huge waste of resources to target ads at me in the wrong language, especially when my browser is passing my preferred language preferences.

Now multiply that by the millions of people who are being mistargetted by ad delivery companies (Google I'm looking at you). What awful losses.

stephenr
What gets me the most is things like Google/fb login pages etc - there is no (that I can see) way to change language on these pages - you have to guess what shit does, which is even harder when you use them only when client work demands integration with one of them, and thus are not familiar.
pki
both fb and google login change language is @ bottom

google's at bottom right

fb's at bottom with largest languages, and a button that opens a modal for the rest.

MildlySerious
This, exactly. I happen to prefer English to my native language, mostly because I prefer to see the original version of content, not some badly translated version which is all it is a lot of the time.

It's extremely frustrating to let websites know I would like to get English content, then be delivered a translated, shortened, bad quality version of the that same content because they think that's better for me.

Actually, while it's probably also a limitation due to licensing, I've had the extremely frustrating experience of trying out Google Play Books on my phone. No language settings. The phone's language, the settings in your Google settings and account are ignored. I'm in Germany, I get the books in German.

I actually would have bought my first book that day if I could have accessed the original version, but I couldn't.

Point is, it's not just ad revenue they're losing out on, but also customers.