Accept my accept-language • Hacker News Board

Re: Accept my accept-language

#21

Post by userbinator » Sun, Mar 16, 2014, 10:43 AM UTC

hrktb wrote: post #15

bhrgunatha wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is what so many websites do now. It causes me constant aggravation. It's nothing to do with your browser settings. They infer your language from your IP address, and for most cases that IS the right thing to do. However for me it isn't. I really really wish there was a way to configure your browser to force websites to accept your language settings. The only other option is to enable cookies so that the website…

Very minor point: the right thing to do is to not infer the language, specially not from the IP, if no explicit information is available. You shoukd make the user choose or take him/her to the default language (there should be an obvious way to change the language from there anyway) If you have multiple language, hopefully you already have a scheme to differentiate the language (i.e. wikipedia has the language in the…

Would assuming that the default language is English be valid? I know a large percentage of the Internet probably doesn't "know English", but if they can connect to the Internet, would they at least recognise enough words (like "language"") that they can choose a different language?

Re: Accept my accept-language

#22

Post by masklinn » Sun, Mar 16, 2014, 11:03 AM UTC

darklajid wrote: post #13

My accept header only contains en-US and en. I tend to get served German content (and Google's especially bad about this). Please, I hope someone hears your complains and starts fixing things. That issue is highly annoying..

> and Google's especially bad about this

Google is a Royal Pain in the Ass on this point. They completely disregard any request configuration and decide on output language based on IP geolocation (which is pretty much always Not What I Want, even more so in multilingual countries such as Belgium or Switzerland[0]), then Chrome "helpfully" suggests translating documents.

[0] where it won't even send you something matching your actual geographical location's language, usually sending the country's most common language — dutch in Belgium and german in Switzerland

Re: Accept my accept-language

#23

Post by Aldo_MX » Sun, Mar 16, 2014, 11:15 AM UTC

Unrelated with the accept-language issue, but somehow related:

I needed to create a yahoo account, and I registered it selecting the kimo.com domain (kimo.com is a Chinese domain owned by yahoo). Since the first moment I set my language preferences to English.

No matter which yahoo service I'm visiting, I always get welcomed by at least the login prompt in Chinese, I can't really complain, because I was the one who looked for a rare domain, but it's an annoyance for me, because yahoo assumes that I understand Chinese because of the domain.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#24

Post by nolok » Sun, Mar 16, 2014, 11:30 AM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #22

darklajid wrote: post #13

My accept header only contains en-US and en. I tend to get served German content (and Google's especially bad about this). Please, I hope someone hears your complains and starts fixing things. That issue is highly annoying..

> and Google's especially bad about this Google is a Royal Pain in the Ass on this point. They completely disregard any request configuration and decide on output language based on IP geolocation (which is pretty much always Not What I Want, even more so in multilingual countries such as Belgium or Switzerland[0]), then Chrome "helpfully" suggests translating documents. [0] where it won't even send you something matc…

This gets very fun once you start using a vpn from another country.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#25

Post by Udo » Sun, Mar 16, 2014, 11:47 AM UTC

Pretty much every major site will completely ignore not only your browser's language settings but also onsite user account settings and other desperate attempts at selecting the language. The only thing that matters is your IP address.

For example, accessing Google: my browser is set to accept English only. I'm entering the English URL. In my account settings I periodically reset everything I can find to English (settings apparently decay, too). Google knows I want the English version. Yet, they still give me the interface in whatever language my IP address comes from. And not only the UI, search results as well.

Recently it's gotten even worse than that: Google figured out I'm actually German, so they start defaulting to German more often now - ignoring everything else. At least with the IP address-based routing it was impersonal.

I happened to be in Sweden when I linked my Facebook calendar to my Google calendar. Ever since that day, my friends' birthdays are given to me in Swedish. Facebook knows I want English, yet for some reason this is how it's got to be.

The same abuse is apparently considered best practice at new startups as well: recently I was testing a browser game for an acquaintance who's on their development team. Because I was in Portugal at the time, I of course got the site in Portuguese. Manually switching that to English, the game still started up in Portuguese. It's been doing that ever since. Every email I get from that company is in Portuguese, too, even though I tried everything I could to set my language to English.

It's a source of endless frustration, maybe even a hostile act. They're effectively saying "Your choices don't matter, we know what's best for you. You're from country X, so you _must_ speak Xish. People are on the internet to enjoy regional separation. Really, it's best."

Re: Accept my accept-language

#26

Post by wisty » Sun, Mar 16, 2014, 11:48 AM UTC

bhrgunatha wrote: post #5

jtokoph wrote: post #2

> 1. the default quality value is being parsed wrong, and English is being assigned q=0 instead of q=1 or > 2. en-US doesn't match en and is being bypassed Or: 3. They are simply checking your IP address and not looking at your header at all.

This is what so many websites do now. It causes me constant aggravation. It's nothing to do with your browser settings. They infer your language from your IP address, and for most cases that IS the right thing to do. However for me it isn't. I really really wish there was a way to configure your browser to force websites to accept your language settings. The only other option is to enable cookies so that the website…

> They infer your language from your IP address, and for most cases that IS the right thing to do.

If IP and accept-language don't match, why not make a prominent button (in the language they didn't pick) to allow you to quickly change?

Re: Accept my accept-language

#27

Post by delroth » Sun, Mar 16, 2014, 11:50 AM UTC

I just fixed dolphin-emu.org, this was a bug in our code that would not detect en-US as being "compatible" with en. See https://github.com/dolphin-emu/www/commit/ddef974c6f601bc2db...

As a French guy leaving in the German part of Switzerland with Accept-Language configured to get English content, I'm kind of ashamed to have that kind of bug in my language detection code. I'm always complaining about other websites language detection, looks like I should have looked at my own code first!

Re: Accept my accept-language

#28

Post by nemetroid » Sun, Mar 16, 2014, 11:55 AM UTC

I'm running an English version of Windows 7 in Sweden. The accept-language headers in each of my installed browsers are:

* IE9: sv-SE

* Firefox: en,sv;q=0.5

* Chrome: en-US,en;q=0.8,sv;q=0.6

I'm going to go ahead and suggest that the reason English comes before Swedish is due to my system language, and that Swedish otherwise would come first. The "users will have the wrong settings" argument seems moot to me.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#29

Post by kiiski » Sun, Mar 16, 2014, 12:06 PM UTC

userbinator wrote: post #21

hrktb wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very minor point: the right thing to do is to not infer the language, specially not from the IP, if no explicit information is available. You shoukd make the user choose or take him/her to the default language (there should be an obvious way to change the language from there anyway) If you have multiple language, hopefully you already have a scheme to differentiate the language (i.e. wikipedia has the language in the…

Would assuming that the default language is English be valid? I know a large percentage of the Internet probably doesn't "know English", but if they can connect to the Internet, would they at least recognise enough words (like "language"") that they can choose a different language?

What makes you think that? If their computer came with an OS preinstalled, with Mongolian, for example, as the language, they would not have to ever see any English anywhere. A flag might be more universally recognized way of selecting the right language.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#30

Post by tonfa » Sun, Mar 16, 2014, 12:12 PM UTC

masklinn wrote: post #22

darklajid wrote: post #13

My accept header only contains en-US and en. I tend to get served German content (and Google's especially bad about this). Please, I hope someone hears your complains and starts fixing things. That issue is highly annoying..

> and Google's especially bad about this Google is a Royal Pain in the Ass on this point. They completely disregard any request configuration and decide on output language based on IP geolocation (which is pretty much always Not What I Want, even more so in multilingual countries such as Belgium or Switzerland[0]), then Chrome "helpfully" suggests translating documents. [0] where it won't even send you something matc…

I live in Switzerland and google does follow my accept-languages (en-US,en;q=0.8,fr;q=0.6,de;q=0.4). When going to google.com in incognito I get google.ch in english which is what I asked.