8 ms·

One of the many reasons why I hate modern websites. They try to be too clever and try to guess what language I want, despite my OS and browser being set to en-U

One of the many reasons why I hate modern websites. They try to be too clever and try to guess what language I want, despite my OS and browser being set to en-US. And then make it particularly difficult to change the language manually in a persistent way. Why even bother with region settings if they're not going to be respected by websites or, hell, even games. I've noticed that if I have my system language set to English and my region set to German, some games will default to German. Which is annoying, but particularly infuriating when some games don't even provide an in-game language select, instead forcing me to Google for the right config file I need to change. And the only reason why I sometimes have my region set to German? There's no other way to change the MS/Xbox store region. Actually, it's not just websites I hate. A lot of software makes me jump through ridiculous hoops to do basic things.

PunksATawnyFill 6y ago
Also: STOP DISABLING ZOOMING. WTF!
- greenknight 6y ago
  my other pet peeve.... stop hi-jacking my scroll wheel and converting it to 'smooth scroll'. i dont want crappy animations, you have content, i have a method of scrolling, let me control how i do this.
  - theprotocol 6y ago
    Smooth scroll that snaps to set scroll levels is absolutely infuriating. I question the psychological integrity of anyone who thinks it's a good idea; how much of a control freak must you be to want to micromanage people's scrolling?
  - hnick 6y ago
    And 90% of the time, smooth scroll isn't.
  - jamil7 6y ago
    Are people still doing this?! Haven't seen it in a while but it was one of the worst web trends of the last few years.
  - umanwizard 6y ago
    Another obnoxious thing is how websites disable the normal behavior of Ctrl+F in favor of whatever their vision of what a search UI should look like is.
    - LukaD 6y ago
      Yeah, that's incredibly annoying. So frustrating when you're coming to a discourse thread from a google search. I tend to avoid discourse forums because of that.
  - adwww 6y ago
    Ha I used to worked on a tablet app that did a load of industrial safety checks. We kept getting tickets to lock more and more of the device down as 'solutions' to support requests. One ticket was to lock the device to maximum brightness, because support had fielded some calls where the users couldn't see the screen. We then started getting calls from users who worked nightshifts complaining that this tablet bolted to their truck was blindling bright and there was nothing they could do to dim or turn off the screen...
- Causality1 6y ago
  The way AMP hijacks my Chrome menu bar and disables tab management until I scroll all the way back up the page to the top makes me actively wish death and despair upon its developers.
- dependenttypes 6y ago
  And stop having bars on sites that stick with me while I am scrolling. Not to mention the infinite scrolling insanity.
  - jamil7 6y ago
    This is handy, I think theres one for Chrome too. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kill-sticky/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kill-sticky/
- Tistron 6y ago
  And please, text selection on mobile. Why is that even possible?
  - Tistron 6y ago
    Downvotes? Is it unclear that I mean that I don't want text selection to be disabled and I am questioning why you can disable that I can select the text in my browser of your website, or is someone really invested in having non-selectable text? I'm surprised.
    - marcosdumay 6y ago
      Your post literally says you do not want text selection to be available. Yes, as you said, this makes no sense, and the only available interpretation is that you do not want it disabled, but it took me a WTF moment before I got to that. Maybe some people are quick to downvote.
      - Tistron 6y ago
        Ok, perhaps "literally". But it's a reply, right? Context is a thing. - [...] A lot of software makes me jump through ridiculous hoops to do basic things. - Also: STOP DISABLING ZOOMING. WTF! - And please, text selection on mobile. Why is that even possible? I guess that's not clear at all once there are many replies. What I'm learning here is to craft responses that stand on their own. This is not a spoken dialogue.
xenomachina 6y ago
This isn't a new thing. Google has been doing this for almost 20 years. I was at Google at the time they first started doing this, and it was somewhat controversial. The rationale (which I still don't agree with) was that many browsers would send "en-US" by default, and so it wasn't a reliable indication of the user's actual language. If you set your Accept-Language to anything else, then Google would pay attention to it, but en-US was treated as if it wasn't set at all.
- Spivak 6y ago
  I feel like this makes sense and probably needs to be applied more broadly. Default settings need to be treated as the lack of a choice rather than an explicit choice for the default. So much software doesn’t make this distinction apparent and makes peoples’, usually users’, lives difficult. If “agree to send me promotional email” is the default (and is gross but that’s not really the point here) you’re missing out on good data knowing who explicitly chose it. If the new version of a software has a setting with a new default but you can’t change it on upgrade because you don’t what users explicitly chose then you wind up with this weird case where version Y fresh and version Y from X behave differently. Maddening for debugging and support.
  - xenomachina 6y ago
    The problem is that there's no way to explicitly say you want "en-US". If you're in a non-English speaking country and your Accept-Language is "en-US" then you're going to get the "local" language. To make matters worse, Google uses ccTLDs for everywhere except the US. google.us just redirects to google.com, and google.com uses your IP to figure out your country, so you can't even use the domain as a workaround.
- swilliamsio 6y ago
  > The rationale (which I still don't agree with) was that many browsers would send "en-US" by default, and so it wasn't a reliable indication of the user's actual language. Sounds like a potential workaround is to set your language to another flavour of English like "en-CA" or "en-GB".
chilldsgn 6y ago
Some games do this too, for example State of Decay, based on what your Steam application language is. It's silly.
- onion2k 6y ago
  Why is defaulting to the user's implicit choice silly? Where there are two possible defaults for a game to use (OS or Steam), the Steam language setting is closer to the game, so it should use that. For most users it'll be correct.
  - andi999 6y ago
    It shd allow that you can choose. Most media content is better in the English original then in some dubbed translates version. The UI doesnt matter what language (apart from understandable by then reader)
    - onion2k 6y ago
      Most media content is better in the English original then in some dubbed translates version. You say that because you speak English. If you don't then obviously English is much worse than even a poor translation. Game developers have to take that in to account - using the user's Steam language setting means they can definitely read that language, so putting the game in that to start with should work for them. The app has to default to something even if the game enables the user to change the setting. Using the user's Steam language is a more sensible starting point for most users than "Everyone gets English". That just completely ignores 80% of the world's population. As for the quality of the translation, the solution for that is for developers to make better translations.
      - andi999 6y ago
        I fully agree. I just meant it shd be easy to change language.
      - sarakayakomzin 6y ago
theshrike79 6y ago
I installed the Halo bundle a week ago, it defaulted to German. I've never been to Germany, the last time I studied german was a quarter century ago. My Xbox isn't set to German either. Even the language selection was hidden in a sub-sub-sub menu somewhere, which took some digging.
- LukaD 6y ago
  > Even the language selection was hidden in a sub-sub-sub menu somewhere, which took some digging. I think it was hidden in the accessibility menu... This made me absolutely furious when I couldn't figure out how to change the game's language to the one that my Windows installation is using.

PunksATawnyFill 6y ago

Also: STOP DISABLING ZOOMING. WTF!

greenknight 6y ago
my other pet peeve.... stop hi-jacking my scroll wheel and converting it to 'smooth scroll'. i dont want crappy animations, you have content, i have a method of scrolling, let me control how i do this.
- theprotocol 6y ago
  Smooth scroll that snaps to set scroll levels is absolutely infuriating. I question the psychological integrity of anyone who thinks it's a good idea; how much of a control freak must you be to want to micromanage people's scrolling?
- hnick 6y ago
  And 90% of the time, smooth scroll isn't.
- jamil7 6y ago
  Are people still doing this?! Haven't seen it in a while but it was one of the worst web trends of the last few years.
- umanwizard 6y ago
  Another obnoxious thing is how websites disable the normal behavior of Ctrl+F in favor of whatever their vision of what a search UI should look like is.
  - LukaD 6y ago
    Yeah, that's incredibly annoying. So frustrating when you're coming to a discourse thread from a google search. I tend to avoid discourse forums because of that.
- adwww 6y ago
  Ha I used to worked on a tablet app that did a load of industrial safety checks. We kept getting tickets to lock more and more of the device down as 'solutions' to support requests. One ticket was to lock the device to maximum brightness, because support had fielded some calls where the users couldn't see the screen. We then started getting calls from users who worked nightshifts complaining that this tablet bolted to their truck was blindling bright and there was nothing they could do to dim or turn off the screen...
Causality1 6y ago
The way AMP hijacks my Chrome menu bar and disables tab management until I scroll all the way back up the page to the top makes me actively wish death and despair upon its developers.
dependenttypes 6y ago
And stop having bars on sites that stick with me while I am scrolling. Not to mention the infinite scrolling insanity.
- jamil7 6y ago
  This is handy, I think theres one for Chrome too. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kill-sticky/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kill-sticky/
Tistron 6y ago
And please, text selection on mobile. Why is that even possible?
- Tistron 6y ago
  Downvotes? Is it unclear that I mean that I don't want text selection to be disabled and I am questioning why you can disable that I can select the text in my browser of your website, or is someone really invested in having non-selectable text? I'm surprised.
  - marcosdumay 6y ago
    Your post literally says you do not want text selection to be available. Yes, as you said, this makes no sense, and the only available interpretation is that you do not want it disabled, but it took me a WTF moment before I got to that. Maybe some people are quick to downvote.
    - Tistron 6y ago
      Ok, perhaps "literally". But it's a reply, right? Context is a thing. - [...] A lot of software makes me jump through ridiculous hoops to do basic things. - Also: STOP DISABLING ZOOMING. WTF! - And please, text selection on mobile. Why is that even possible? I guess that's not clear at all once there are many replies. What I'm learning here is to craft responses that stand on their own. This is not a spoken dialogue.

xenomachina 6y ago

This isn't a new thing. Google has been doing this for almost 20 years. I was at Google at the time they first started doing this, and it was somewhat controversial. The rationale (which I still don't agree with) was that many browsers would send "en-US" by default, and so it wasn't a reliable indication of the user's actual language. If you set your Accept-Language to anything else, then Google would pay attention to it, but en-US was treated as if it wasn't set at all.

Spivak 6y ago
I feel like this makes sense and probably needs to be applied more broadly. Default settings need to be treated as the lack of a choice rather than an explicit choice for the default. So much software doesn’t make this distinction apparent and makes peoples’, usually users’, lives difficult. If “agree to send me promotional email” is the default (and is gross but that’s not really the point here) you’re missing out on good data knowing who explicitly chose it. If the new version of a software has a setting with a new default but you can’t change it on upgrade because you don’t what users explicitly chose then you wind up with this weird case where version Y fresh and version Y from X behave differently. Maddening for debugging and support.
- xenomachina 6y ago
  The problem is that there's no way to explicitly say you want "en-US". If you're in a non-English speaking country and your Accept-Language is "en-US" then you're going to get the "local" language. To make matters worse, Google uses ccTLDs for everywhere except the US. google.us just redirects to google.com, and google.com uses your IP to figure out your country, so you can't even use the domain as a workaround.
swilliamsio 6y ago
> The rationale (which I still don't agree with) was that many browsers would send "en-US" by default, and so it wasn't a reliable indication of the user's actual language. Sounds like a potential workaround is to set your language to another flavour of English like "en-CA" or "en-GB".

chilldsgn 6y ago

Some games do this too, for example State of Decay, based on what your Steam application language is. It's silly.

onion2k 6y ago
Why is defaulting to the user's implicit choice silly? Where there are two possible defaults for a game to use (OS or Steam), the Steam language setting is closer to the game, so it should use that. For most users it'll be correct.
- andi999 6y ago
  It shd allow that you can choose. Most media content is better in the English original then in some dubbed translates version. The UI doesnt matter what language (apart from understandable by then reader)
  - onion2k 6y ago
    Most media content is better in the English original then in some dubbed translates version. You say that because you speak English. If you don't then obviously English is much worse than even a poor translation. Game developers have to take that in to account - using the user's Steam language setting means they can definitely read that language, so putting the game in that to start with should work for them. The app has to default to something even if the game enables the user to change the setting. Using the user's Steam language is a more sensible starting point for most users than "Everyone gets English". That just completely ignores 80% of the world's population. As for the quality of the translation, the solution for that is for developers to make better translations.
    - andi999 6y ago
      I fully agree. I just meant it shd be easy to change language.
    - sarakayakomzin 6y ago

theshrike79 6y ago

I installed the Halo bundle a week ago, it defaulted to German. I've never been to Germany, the last time I studied german was a quarter century ago. My Xbox isn't set to German either. Even the language selection was hidden in a sub-sub-sub menu somewhere, which took some digging.

LukaD 6y ago
> Even the language selection was hidden in a sub-sub-sub menu somewhere, which took some digging. I think it was hidden in the accessibility menu... This made me absolutely furious when I couldn't figure out how to change the game's language to the one that my Windows installation is using.