3 ms·

If you speak an uncommon language, this is effectively almost the same as disabling it completely, because so few websites will support your language. They will

If you speak an uncommon language, this is effectively almost the same as disabling it completely, because so few websites will support your language. They will probably default to whatever the default language of that website is, which may or may not be a language you speak. I understand that it's easy to disable it, but it feels like a default that is strongly biased in favour of speakers of English and other widely spoken languages. Maybe there should be a way to request all languages together and let the client pick whichever one it wants (I'm sure the text on a typical page when compressed, even times 50, is still negligible compared to the 50 MB of JavaScript frameworks it is probably pulling in) That would not sacrifice usability for privacy.

riedel 4y ago
Actually it would be good if the default would be that you can request language based on domain name and tld. Actually i normally would want German as default for all .de sites and would chose English for the rest. But here I see no added privacy in a normal setting if I do not use vpn, because 90% of IP addresses from Germany would report the same two languages. So only e.g. if I travel e.g. to Japan it makes me quite fingerprintable. So I think the ideal would be if some entropy score could be displayed/predicted based on context (e.g. source or target address as above) and I could dynamically chose the trade-off between a bit of privacy and convenience. The funny thing is that e.g. if you are in a country with a nonenglish speaking majority that has English as second language, just reporting either language assigns you to a smaller subgroup and makes no sense.
- Semaphor 4y ago
  That would be amazing. Report German for all .de sites, just English for everything else. Not because of privacy, but because that’s what will probably give me the best quality ;)
  - piaste 4y ago
    It would make sense if websites had a standardized response with the language preferences of _their content_, and browsers simply responded with whatever their user chooses among the available ones. Something like { 0: de, 1: [en,fr], 2: [ru,es], 999: [zh,jp,...] } where the keys are an arbitrary 'priority' score chosen by the server. 0 would be the original language, then in this example maybe 1 could be full human translation, 2 partial human translation, 999 machine translation. The browser could keep its language preferences client-side and simply request their favourite language among the available ones.

riedel 4y ago

Actually it would be good if the default would be that you can request language based on domain name and tld. Actually i normally would want German as default for all .de sites and would chose English for the rest. But here I see no added privacy in a normal setting if I do not use vpn, because 90% of IP addresses from Germany would report the same two languages. So only e.g. if I travel e.g. to Japan it makes me quite fingerprintable. So I think the ideal would be if some entropy score could be displayed/predicted based on context (e.g. source or target address as above) and I could dynamically chose the trade-off between a bit of privacy and convenience. The funny thing is that e.g. if you are in a country with a nonenglish speaking majority that has English as second language, just reporting either language assigns you to a smaller subgroup and makes no sense.

Semaphor 4y ago
That would be amazing. Report German for all .de sites, just English for everything else. Not because of privacy, but because that’s what will probably give me the best quality ;)
- piaste 4y ago
  It would make sense if websites had a standardized response with the language preferences of _their content_, and browsers simply responded with whatever their user chooses among the available ones. Something like { 0: de, 1: [en,fr], 2: [ru,es], 999: [zh,jp,...] } where the keys are an arbitrary 'priority' score chosen by the server. 0 would be the original language, then in this example maybe 1 could be full human translation, 2 partial human translation, 999 machine translation. The browser could keep its language preferences client-side and simply request their favourite language among the available ones.