3 ms·
In my experience Accept-Language header is pretty unreliable. It tends to just be one of a few values. Between people never updating it, proxies stripping it, p
by throwaway2016a 2y ago
In my experience Accept-Language header is pretty unreliable. It tends to just be one of a few values. Between people never updating it, proxies stripping it, people concerned it will make them easier to fingerprint, etc.
Also, form an implementation standpoint, translation is a lot of work to get right and some companies may not do it for all languages so they may support the header but just not support the language choice you have. Yelp being a weird example where they apparently have the Japanese translation on another site.
Combine all that together and it's not usually worth the effort to do it unless you have specific legal requirements or high demand from users.
- cdaringe 2y agoProxies stripping it? Tell me more.
- throwaway2016a 2y ago(Sorry for the delay, I haven't checked HN is a while and just noticed this) So some proxies (forward and reverse) will strip this header for different reasons. The reverse proxies sometimes strip it to improve caching and/or because they were configured to have a allow-list of headers and this (being a less common one) was excluded. The forward proxies will sometimes strip it for privacy reasons (it can be used in fingerprinting) or for the same reason (they have a list of allowed headers and this isn't one).