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I think part of the reason might be that the browser settings aren't as reliable as location data. A lot of people even outside the US, have their browser/OS se
by LamboJ 5y ago
I think part of the reason might be that the browser settings aren't as reliable as location data. A lot of people even outside the US, have their browser/OS set to en-US from the default configuration. Even if they might be located in France or India. If Google had determined that was the case more than 50% of the time, then I can see why they favour using location for language instead of browser settings.
- ivansavz 5y agoYes, that's exactly my experience. Most people who install windows don't bother to set the locale correctly, so everyone ends up en-US. So if you trust the Accept Language header, you'll get it wrong.
- nicolas_t 5y agoIn which country did you see that? I'm curious because that contradicts my experience.
- ivansavz 5y agoMy anecdotes are from two countries: 1. In Quebec, Canada where French speakers keep the default en-US, even thought most of their work and communications will be in fr-CA. 2. In Bulgaria, because most people learned computer concepts in English so seeing OS and Browser menus in Bulgarian would be confusing to them.
- nicolas_t 5y agoThanks, I guess both cases make sense and in that case geolocation probably works better.
- nicolas_t 5y agoThat hasn't been my experience both from running a site in Europe using the accept language header as default and from my anecdotal experience with friends in Asia and Europe. In general, I think using geoip is much more likely to get things wrong than using the accept language.
- Nextgrid 5y agoSo if that's the case then give them the en-US version? They'll either accept it because that's what they've explicitly requested, or change their system settings to match what they actually want.
- Symbiote 5y agoI added Accept-Language to our web logs for a month before we added our first site translation. That showed us that the majority of people had a language matching the expectation we would have from an IP geolocation, so we use Accept-Language alone.
- netsharc 5y agoI wonder if they could just change the browser to hint about "Do you want content in your local language?". I wonder if the dominant browser vendor on the web would be willing to accommodate Google...
- account42 5y agoThe could even work together with the dominant smartphone OS maker to solve it there as well.