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E.g. on mobile just scroll to bottom of fist page and pick different language.
E.g. on desktop just go to settings and pick language.
I'm pretty sure this works awesome since I've used this all my life.
I would expect power users to look for simple solution instead of ranting.
Who the hell are you guys if you can't find language settings!!!
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Same for me here in Denmark for google and gmail - I don't f***g speak Danish!
So the Googlers in Zurich Switzerland should get a Swiss German version. I'm sure they'd fix that soon enough.
My vote goes to the “Org Too Big, Nobody Cares” explanation. Or, perhaps, just the blissful America-centric ignorance about how there are regions in the world with multiple official languages. Haven't checked this recently, but a while ago Google Maps was still serving street names in a random language (the first name in alphabetical ordering), for streets which have names in multiple languages.
> Or, perhaps just the blissful America-centric ignorance about how there are regions in the world where there are multiple official languages As a brit, I am always irked that most of what I browse is locked to US English, as if it's the same thing as British English. At least if your main language is a popular non-English language you get the option to switch to it. This is compounded by those location drop-downs,…
We had a very angry American (presumably) who accused us of "cultural imperialism" for having an en-GB option but no en-US option.
Got to say I was laughing about that for quite some time.
I think part of the reason might be that the browser settings aren't as reliable as location data. A lot of people even outside the US, have their browser/OS set to en-US from the default configuration. Even if they might be located in France or India. If Google had determined that was the case more than 50% of the time, then I can see why they favour using location for language instead of browser settings.
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2022-March-11 is the master date format. No US injected ambiguity and no chance for misintrepretation.
i just looked up, the "American" confusion: we got our date order from the English long ago. Then the English changed their date order. That must have been most confusing And month/day is not as confusing as day/month (widely used in Europe) since it doesn't correspond to how we say dates. moving the year first then using the American MM/DD is the least confusing way to do it
Not trying to argue one way or the other, just adding some extra context.
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Better explanation: monolingual people thinks that computers will always be configured to the local language and any other setup is a "misconfiguration". In real life a large number of corporations (and developers) have their computers configured with English as this is the main language of the coorporation and makes IT-support much easier. (we don't even need to talk about how badly botched many language translation…
French native speaker here. UX consistency, shared Internet culture, habits from the early 90's and error messages I can actually find on the Web are the reasons why I always set my computing to the english language. I'm trying to have English language but metric units, 24 hour clock and ISO dates... Seldom can I achieve that. On the French-language mandatory corporate Windows laptop, Excel formulas are translated in…
I met one-on-one with Google’s senior leadership in 2000 to talk about their internationalization efforts. This was very early in their trajectory, so I even sat down with Larry Page and chatted with him for half an hour. A year or two later I’m in Tokyo and talk to a new Google product manager based there. I tell her it is insane that Google serves me Japanese pages on my English-configured PowerBook just because I…
I worked at Google in 2000, and I found this annoying too, so I asked about it. The official reason was that a lot of browsers defaulted to en-US, so Google effectively treats an Accept-Language of en-US as a no-op, and then it falls through to location-based. (I don't agree with this rationale, and said as much, but there you have it.) Note that other values for Accept-Language are not ignored. I haven't tried it my…
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You know exactly how to get to Google in English though, don't you? A new person picking up a misconfigured laptop seems much more likely to get lost than a temporary visitor to another country.
That's not the point. People should not be forced to switch from one language to another, multiple times, for every site they visit , when in a country that speaks a different language than the one for which their computer is configured.
You shouldn't have to change this setting multiple times when you're in a country that speaks (well, writes, really) a different language than your computer is configured for. You would like the web to respect your configuration.
On the otherhand, the general public shouldn't have to change this setting multiple times when they're in a country that writes a different language than their computers are configured for. They would like the web to respect their location. Even though they imported a computer configured for English and don't know how to (or don't want to) configure the language options for the whole computer or the browser.
If language settings were easily and often set, they'd be respected more; but if there's a good chance people are more likely to want a local language than what the computer thinks they want, then ignoring the preferences is the right thing for most users. Even if it's infuriating for those it missed. When I had the fortune of working on multi-language sites, I would try to have each site have their own urls, but some places insisted on one url, multiple languages. Trying to make a reasonable initial language decision and then a language picker with a cookie was the best I could do.
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2022-03-11, actually. It's an ISO standard, has no ambiguity, is more language agnostic, and alphabetical sort coincides with chronological sort. https://www.iso.org/iso-8601-date-and-time-format.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601
i use 2022-03mar-11 or 202203mar11 it most importantly sorts properly when used at the front of a filename, and it's surprisingly easy to read; and in context I'm mostly looking at the month-date which can be picked off the end, "march 11" which is how we say dates in English anyway time of day can be appended without messing with the collation (usually i put a space)
I think every time this topic comes up I come across someone with this misconception - usually from a country that celebrates the 4th of July.