

Ask HN: Why do websites ignore HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE? - decasteve

My browser sends &#x27;en-US,en&#x27; for English. Yet many sites surreptitiously use a geo-ip lookup to decide what language I &quot;should&quot; be using.<p>I&#x27;m curious to know the pros and cons for this practice.
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Piskvorrr
From stats ("site lang set by header and then changed by user"), most browsers
are misconfigured (Everyone Is American, yay! Except those weird people who
are not, oh well, let's send an accept-language of en-US anyway.)

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junto
This is a personal pet hate of mine. As an English speaker in a non-English
speaking country I have everything targeted at me in the wrong language.

What annoys me the most is that it is a huge waste of resources to target ads
at me in the wrong language, especially when my browser is passing my
preferred language preferences.

Now multiply that by the millions of people who are being mistargetted by ad
delivery companies (Google I'm looking at you). What awful losses.

~~~
stephenr
What gets me the most is things like Google/fb login pages etc - there is no
(that I can see) way to change language on these pages - you have to guess
what shit does, which is even harder when you use them only when client work
demands integration with one of them, and thus are not familiar.

~~~
pki
both fb and google login change language is @ bottom

google's at bottom right

fb's at bottom with largest languages, and a button that opens a modal for the
rest.

