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Accept my accept-language

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Re: Accept my accept-language

#31

Post by nrser »

Udo wrote: post #25

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 (set…

can anyone provide insight into the business reasoning behind this? i really can't conceive of why you would want to supersede a user's exact, known language with a guess. sites are pretty difficult to use when you can't read anything. maybe there are technical issues for some sites, but Google search is the worse i've ever dealt with, and they def have some resources behind that.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#32

Post by morsch »

Udo wrote: post #25

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 (set…

Go to http://www.google.com/ncr (once, it sets a cookie) to fix this at least for the search results.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#33

Post by thefreeman »

nrser wrote: post #31
Udo wrote: post #25

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 (set…

can anyone provide insight into the business reasoning behind this? i really can't conceive of why you would want to supersede a user's exact, known language with a guess. sites are pretty difficult to use when you can't read anything. maybe there are technical issues for some sites, but Google search is the worse i've ever dealt with, and they def have some resources behind that.

It sounds like it could be legal? I know different countries have different agreements / restrictions with google about search results.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#34

Post by raverbashing »

If I access Google using and European IP it will show the Google page for the Country I am in, regardless of my accept-language

(I don't have an accept-language for Dutch, Italian, German, French but in all these cases I was shown the local page)

Re: Accept my accept-language

#35

Post by junto »

I have blogged about this several times. Google are one of the worst offenders. I'm not sure if it is insular non-travelled US developers with a deep love of IP-to-geolication databases, or an anally retentive legal department, but it really sucks as a user experience.

From an advertising perspective this is a major market that is being overlooked, because guess what, I don't look at ads that much, but you can bet your bottom advertising dollar that I'm definitely not going to read it in a language that isn't my mother tongue.

IP address != language preference

It is about time that developers got that through their thick skulls.

Finally, over here in Europe we can live in whichever EU country we want to. This means that we can move countries easily. I've already been in four of them. I don't think I'm an edge case by any means. People migrate.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#36

Post by gioele »

To avoid such problems in Rack/Rails Ruby project I suggest the rack-i18n_best_langs gem (regardless of the name, it does not depend on the i18n gem) I wrote:

    https://github.com/gioele/rack-i18n_best_langs
> Differently from other similar Rack middleware components, rack-i18n_best_langs returns a list of languages in order of guessed importance, not a single language.

> Language discovery is done using three clues:

> * the presences of language tags in paths (e.g. /service/warranty/ita),

> * the content of the HTTP Accept-Language header,

> * the content of the rack.i18n_best_langs cookie when set.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#37

Post by nocoment »

nrser wrote: post #31
Udo wrote: post #25

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 (set…

can anyone provide insight into the business reasoning behind this? i really can't conceive of why you would want to supersede a user's exact, known language with a guess. sites are pretty difficult to use when you can't read anything. maybe there are technical issues for some sites, but Google search is the worse i've ever dealt with, and they def have some resources behind that.

Well, the Adword value of your visit is considerably higher in the primary language of your location.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#38

Post by Hello71 »

kiiski wrote: post #29
userbinator wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/flags.html

Re: Accept my accept-language

#39

Post by _delirium »

tonfa wrote: post #30
masklinn wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I don't get that behavior in Firefox. I have 'en-US' and 'en' as my preferred languages (in that order), set via Preferences->Content->Languages. But when I go to google.com in incognito, I get google.dk in Danish.

I guess English is preferred here commonly enough that it's at least listed as one of the two alternate google.dk languages in an easy-to-find place under the search box, along with Faroese. "Google.dk på: Føroyskt English". And if you click "English" it stays with it for the session. No luck if you wanted something else like German, though.

Re: Accept my accept-language

#40

Post by spacehunt »

delroth wrote: post #27

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 la…

Please don't do this... I detest sites that try to be clever and serve me Simplified Chinese even though I only have zh-hk in Accept-Language:.
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