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No, not everyone who uses browsers will actually go through settings and deal with this. Plenty of folks run browsers without the default language changed (it's
by Manishearth 10y ago
No, not everyone who uses browsers will actually go through settings and deal with this. Plenty of folks run browsers without the default language changed (it's a nontrivial procedure!), and they'd likely not look for the language tweaking UI. The browser UI language isn't actually too important -- all the important buttons these days are icons. The language you see Google in is more important.
Some UX could certainly be designed around this. Google could default to Accept-Language and say "Did you want Google in Language X" (in the IP detected language) in a bubble, with a link that triggers the language-setting UI (somehow). Or it could default to IP detection with an API for the reverse. The current situation of far too many people sending flawed `Accept-Language "en-US,en;q=0.5"` headers will have to be worked around somehow.
Google already suggests English when it detects that you've changed the language you use (I'm not sure if it suggests english when you are logged out and switch locations, or if it perhaps suggests whatever your Accept-Language is)
- MichaelGG 10y agoI try to avoid Chrome but in the past I've used it to search with Google. I'll get "local" Spanish language results which Chrome then promptly offers to translate to English.
- nv-vn 10y agoImagine if the first time you opened your browser it had a big grid of flags/languages to choose from. This would be trivial to get users the right Accept-Language. You could even have it do this every time you open the browser if the computer is used by multiple people.
- spacehunt 10y agoYou are assuming the site would remember what language the users have told it to use. YouTube, even after all these years, forgets this every 3 days, even when I'm still logged in. But it doesn't forget what ads to shove to me though.
- int_19h 10y agoThe site wouldn't have to remember. It would get an Accept-Language header in every request, and should just use that.
- spacehunt 10y agoWhich is still the wrong way to go about it, unless the browser lets users easily set this per site, like how some browsers did for text encoding.
- int_19h 10y agoIt's the right way to pick the default even now. Websites can still provide language selection. Although, yes, it would be better if there was a way to define Accept-Language on a per-domain basis (including wildcards).