4 ms·

I know they're not singling me out, but I personally think rewarding ignorant behavior (to the cost of educated behavior!) is a bad strategy. Ideally, they wou

I know they're not singling me out, but I personally think rewarding ignorant behavior (to the cost of educated behavior!) is a bad strategy. Ideally, they would have a button that says "not your language? Click here to set the language and find out why sites keep showing you the wrong one". EDIT: Actually, thinking about this more I don't think your point holds. Nearly everyone who buys a PC in a given country will buy one set up for their locale. Do you think that e.g. Germany is selling a bunch of computers configured with english as the prefered language? I seriously doubt that.

edanm 16y ago
I'm in a non-English speaking country. My best guess is that all normal users buy a computer with the local language, but all technologically-minded users buy an English Windows (like me, for example). It drives me mad whenever I visit Google on a browser whose cookies I just cleared. "I personally think rewarding ignorant behavior (to the cost of educated behavior!) is a bad strategy." Totally disagree. Most users couldn't care less about why things work the way they do. They just want them to work. Google's job is to make the average users have the most seamless experience possible, a job at which they excel.
- borisk 16y ago
  "Most users couldn't care less about why things work the way they do. They just want them to work. Google's job is to make the average users have the most seamless experience possible, a job at which they excel." OMG this is SOOO stupid. Hackers will get annoyed enough and will move to other search engines and development platforms. And after some time average users will follow. This is exactly the twisted (non)thinking coming from Microsoft these days. Lets make an OS for 80 yo grandpas. Why not remove the drive free space indication in explorer, it confuses old ladies (and the same explorer ships with Windows Server ...). How bright do you think is the future of Windows and Microsoft?
- loewenskind 16y ago
  >Totally disagree. Most users couldn't care less about why things work the way they do. And this is exactly what should not be catered to. Especially when it's simple to show users how to fix this. By jumping through such hoops to guess what is correct they basically force everyone else to do the same thing or else appear to be less "friendly" than google. This kind of thinking is exactly what got us the HTML/CSS misery we have today.
avar 16y ago
Do you have some statistics on that? Google probably does, and that probably factored into their decision to not trust use the Accept-Language header as their sole mechanism for deciding what language to serve content in. Most computers with Windows sold in large markets like Germany probably send the right Accept-Language headers, but there's a lot of localities where this isn't the case. Small countries like Iceland just use the stock English version of Windows, then there's stuff like mobile devices which may not send Accept-Language at all to think about.

edanm 16y ago

I'm in a non-English speaking country. My best guess is that all normal users buy a computer with the local language, but all technologically-minded users buy an English Windows (like me, for example). It drives me mad whenever I visit Google on a browser whose cookies I just cleared. "I personally think rewarding ignorant behavior (to the cost of educated behavior!) is a bad strategy." Totally disagree. Most users couldn't care less about why things work the way they do. They just want them to work. Google's job is to make the average users have the most seamless experience possible, a job at which they excel.

borisk 16y ago
"Most users couldn't care less about why things work the way they do. They just want them to work. Google's job is to make the average users have the most seamless experience possible, a job at which they excel." OMG this is SOOO stupid. Hackers will get annoyed enough and will move to other search engines and development platforms. And after some time average users will follow. This is exactly the twisted (non)thinking coming from Microsoft these days. Lets make an OS for 80 yo grandpas. Why not remove the drive free space indication in explorer, it confuses old ladies (and the same explorer ships with Windows Server ...). How bright do you think is the future of Windows and Microsoft?
loewenskind 16y ago
>Totally disagree. Most users couldn't care less about why things work the way they do. And this is exactly what should not be catered to. Especially when it's simple to show users how to fix this. By jumping through such hoops to guess what is correct they basically force everyone else to do the same thing or else appear to be less "friendly" than google. This kind of thinking is exactly what got us the HTML/CSS misery we have today.

avar 16y ago

Do you have some statistics on that? Google probably does, and that probably factored into their decision to not trust use the Accept-Language header as their sole mechanism for deciding what language to serve content in. Most computers with Windows sold in large markets like Germany probably send the right Accept-Language headers, but there's a lot of localities where this isn't the case. Small countries like Iceland just use the stock English version of Windows, then there's stuff like mobile devices which may not send Accept-Language at all to think about.