On: Why does Google use location for language rather t...

[xenomachina]

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.

[ehPReth → xenomachina]

Interesting! 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

[lamontcg → xenomachina]

And once a rationale like this has become part of company culture for >20 years, there is almost no way it is ever changing.

[justinmayer → xenomachina]

Thank you for effectively confirming what I long suspected. Much appreciated.

[withinboredom → xenomachina]

en-NL worked perfectly, thanks for this tip!

[jannes → withinboredom]

This will make your browser very fingerprintable because it’s very uncommon.

[withinboredom → jannes]

I have an extension to override the locale per-site.