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I worked at Google in 2000, and I found this annoying too, so I asked about it. The official reason was that a lot of browsers defaulted to en-US, so Google eff
by xenomachina 5y ago
I worked at Google in 2000, and I found this annoying too, so I asked about it. The official reason was that a lot of browsers defaulted to en-US, so Google effectively treats an Accept-Language of en-US as a no-op, and then it falls through to location-based. (I don't agree with this rationale, and said as much, but there you have it.)
Note that other values for Accept-Language are not ignored. I haven't tried it myself, but I've heard some people say that setting their language to en-GB or en-CA works well.
You can also use &hl=en-US, which always takes precedence.
- withinboredom 5y agoen-NL worked perfectly, thanks for this tip!
- jannes 5y agoThis will make your browser very fingerprintable because it’s very uncommon.
- withinboredom 5y agoI have an extension to override the locale per-site.
- justinmayer 5y agoThank you for effectively confirming what I long suspected. Much appreciated.
- lamontcg 5y agoAnd once a rationale like this has become part of company culture for >20 years, there is almost no way it is ever changing.
- ehPReth 5y agoInteresting! Thanks :) One sad thing is localization for Canada is kind of broken for a lot of platforms it seems? For a lot of people that I help having their locale has Canada seems to usually base it off of United Kingdom stuff including setting paper size as A4(!) Which… I wish we used but unfortunately we don’t - we use the US paper system. this causes problems with stricter printers and printing and also just manufacturing stuff like PDFs