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Comment by Sevaris | Hacker News Reader

One of the many reasons why I hate modern websites. They try to be too clever and try to guess what language I want, despite my OS and browser being set to en-US. And then make it particularly difficult to change the language manually in a persistent way. Why even bother with region settings if they're not going to be respected by websites or, hell, even games. I've noticed that if I have my system language set to English and my region set to German, some games will default to German. Which is annoying, but particularly infuriating when some games don't even provide an in-game language select, instead forcing me to Google for the right config file I need to change. And the only reason why I sometimes have my region set to German? There's no other way to change the MS/Xbox store region.

Actually, it's not just websites I hate. A lot of software makes me jump through ridiculous hoops to do basic things.

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This isn't a new thing. Google has been doing this for almost 20 years. I was at Google at the time they first started doing this, and it was somewhat controversial.

The rationale (which I still don't agree with) was that many browsers would send "en-US" by default, and so it wasn't a reliable indication of the user's actual language. If you set your Accept-Language to anything else, then Google would pay attention to it, but en-US was treated as if it wasn't set at all.

I feel like this makes sense and probably needs to be applied more broadly.

Default settings need to be treated as the lack of a choice rather than an explicit choice for the default. So much software doesn’t make this distinction apparent and makes peoples’, usually users’, lives difficult.

If “agree to send me promotional email” is the default (and is gross but that’s not really the point here) you’re missing out on good data knowing who explicitly chose it. If the new version of a software has a setting with a new default but you can’t change it on upgrade because you don’t what users explicitly chose then you wind up with this weird case where version Y fresh and version Y from X behave differently. Maddening for debugging and support.

The problem is that there's no way to explicitly say you want "en-US". If you're in a non-English speaking country and your Accept-Language is "en-US" then you're going to get the "local" language.

To make matters worse, Google uses ccTLDs for everywhere except the US. google.us just redirects to google.com, and google.com uses your IP to figure out your country, so you can't even use the domain as a workaround.

> The rationale (which I still don't agree with) was that many browsers would send "en-US" by default, and so it wasn't a reliable indication of the user's actual language.

Sounds like a potential workaround is to set your language to another flavour of English like "en-CA" or "en-GB".

Yes. I think most Google properties also support an hl query parameter that will work even if set to "en-US". Either way, not ideal.

Another useful one is www.google.com/ncr which opens Google in English (NCR= No Country Redirect)

Unfortunately various sites, particularly Google's, gatekeep functionality behind the language/region setting.

Browser set to en-au? "Oh, I'm sorry, you can't use this feature yet because it's not in your region." for years after launch.

So they set your location from your language and your language from your location...

I have my language set to "en-GB" and still many websites (including Google, when not signed in) default to that of the country I'm in.

If I'm in Denmark, and I've got an en-US browser setting it can be because I am visiting Denmark, in which case I probably don't know the language, or two because I have made a conscious effort to get an English version of the browser.

In short if your location has a different default language setting than what you are sending, what you are sending is probably what you really prefer.

> in which case I probably don't know the language, or two because I have made a conscious effort to get an English version of the browser.

...or because your browser defaults to sending en-US even though you're using a Danish-localized browser on a Danish operating system, as described by the parent comment.

I'm willing to bet there is no modern browser that does this.

I don't think you've read the parent comment very closely, if I'm mistaken please point out to me where they exactly discuss localization of browsers and Danish operating systems? Those are factors you've put into your definition of what by default means.

It is however not what I experience when I look at my Danish localized firefox because it sends da-DK by default, and my english browser sends en-Us, because I took the effort to make it so, because I don't much like the Danish language for UI.

I admit this is just a quick look over of the different language browsers I have on my system. What do the different language browsers on your system do that you feel so confident in telling me to pay more attention to the parent comment?

> many browsers would send "en-US" by default, and so it wasn't a reliable indication of the user's actual language

Indicating that "the user's actual language" and "en-US" are different. Yes, I extrapolated this to both the browser and the operating system having a different language, maybe it was just one or the other.

> What do the different language browsers on your system

From the parent comment:

> Google has been doing this for almost 20 years. [...] The rationale (which I still don't agree with) was [...]

I don't have any 20 years old browsers to test with, I'm afraid.

If someone has been doing something for 20 years the normal interpretation of that would be they started doing it 20 years ago and are still doing it, and you probably don't need 20 year old browsers to actually test it.

> many browsers would send "en-US" by default

Which browsers? I'm using Chrome and it definitely does not do that. Should be easy to find out that with user agent.

As I stated in the comment you quoted from, this was about 20 years ago. Also, Chrome is made by Google, so it seems entirely reasonable that someone fixed a problem they found annoying about browsers. (At the same time, Google is so big now that they may continue ignoring "en-US" because of momentum and/or because no-one remembers the original reason behind that decision.)

Google was the most major annoyance when I was expat, as it would default to an alphabet I could barely read. Trying to find the 'English' setting at the time was a nightmare.

I'm surprised browsers haven't addressed this yet, by adding an extra header stating if the locale is in the default setting or if the user has explicitly configured it.

For Google it is extreme.

The results you get are very much dependant on where you are visiting from. I can set my everything to Japanese, both in my browser, OS and my Google user account and search via google.co.jp - but if I am not in Japan, results will be skewed away from Japanese websites.

For example: The other day I wanted to find the lyrics for the Japanese version of a song, so I typed "[song name] 歌詞" and because Google knows that 歌詞 means lyrics, and it can see I'm in Europe, my top result was an English lyric site, with the original version of the lyrics and no mention of the Japanese word from my search term. Technically, that is really impressive, but kinda useless.

On top of that, it can sometimes be impossible to visit help or product pages if you happen to be in the wrong country.

I'm in the USA and get Japanese results when I search for things in Japanese. Google has settings for both region and search result language, I would try setting those.

It’s not that you don’t get Japanese results - adding a few more words to the query got the result I needed. It’s how about how far they force their localization on users.

Exactly right. A modern website is one that knows that the browser's configured language is the best way to determine the user's language. A website that uses location to determine language is hopelessly outdated.

I never completely agreed with the rationale for using location, but 15-20 years ago I at least found it understandable...Internet Cafes and borrowing your host's desktop computer were more common scenarios then. Today they're rare enough that I can't understand why anyone would accommodate those scenarios over the scenario of someone traveling with their own device.

This rationalization may have been valid at the time, but certainly the software has changed in the intervening 20 years such that it is very likely that the user configured their OS and environment to their preferred language weights -- at least their preferred primary language.

Given Google's wanton dropping support for RFC-compliant HTTPS in the name of changing times, certainly they should be open to changing this policy with the appropriate data.

> If you set your Accept-Language to anything else, then Google would pay attention to it, but en-US was treated as if it wasn't set at all.

Thank you so very much for this tip! I don't use cookies and live in a non-English country so I've been clicking that yellow "change to English results" button for at least half a decade now, numerous times a day, every day. Switching to en-GB indeed makes Google respect my language choice.

Not kidding, you've just saved me thousands and thousands of clicks and small annoyances.

Also: STOP DISABLING ZOOMING.

WTF!

my other pet peeve.... stop hi-jacking my scroll wheel and converting it to 'smooth scroll'. i dont want crappy animations, you have content, i have a method of scrolling, let me control how i do this.

Smooth scroll that snaps to set scroll levels is absolutely infuriating. I question the psychological integrity of anyone who thinks it's a good idea; how much of a control freak must you be to want to micromanage people's scrolling?

And 90% of the time, smooth scroll isn't.

Are people still doing this?! Haven't seen it in a while but it was one of the worst web trends of the last few years.

Another obnoxious thing is how websites disable the normal behavior of Ctrl+F in favor of whatever their vision of what a search UI should look like is.

Yeah, that's incredibly annoying. So frustrating when you're coming to a discourse thread from a google search. I tend to avoid discourse forums because of that.

Ha I used to worked on a tablet app that did a load of industrial safety checks.

We kept getting tickets to lock more and more of the device down as 'solutions' to support requests.

One ticket was to lock the device to maximum brightness, because support had fielded some calls where the users couldn't see the screen.

We then started getting calls from users who worked nightshifts complaining that this tablet bolted to their truck was blindling bright and there was nothing they could do to dim or turn off the screen...

The way AMP hijacks my Chrome menu bar and disables tab management until I scroll all the way back up the page to the top makes me actively wish death and despair upon its developers.

And stop having bars on sites that stick with me while I am scrolling.

Not to mention the infinite scrolling insanity.

This is handy, I think theres one for Chrome too. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/kill-sticky/

And please, text selection on mobile. Why is that even possible?

Downvotes?

Is it unclear that I mean that I don't want text selection to be disabled and I am questioning why you can disable that I can select the text in my browser of your website, or is someone really invested in having non-selectable text? I'm surprised.

Your post literally says you do not want text selection to be available.

Yes, as you said, this makes no sense, and the only available interpretation is that you do not want it disabled, but it took me a WTF moment before I got to that. Maybe some people are quick to downvote.

Ok, perhaps "literally". But it's a reply, right? Context is a thing.

- [...] A lot of software makes me jump through ridiculous hoops to do basic things.

- Also: STOP DISABLING ZOOMING. WTF!

- And please, text selection on mobile. Why is that even possible?

I guess that's not clear at all once there are many replies. What I'm learning here is to craft responses that stand on their own. This is not a spoken dialogue.

I installed the Halo bundle a week ago, it defaulted to German.

I've never been to Germany, the last time I studied german was a quarter century ago. My Xbox isn't set to German either.

Even the language selection was hidden in a sub-sub-sub menu somewhere, which took some digging.

> Even the language selection was hidden in a sub-sub-sub menu somewhere, which took some digging.

I think it was hidden in the accessibility menu... This made me absolutely furious when I couldn't figure out how to change the game's language to the one that my Windows installation is using.

Some games do this too, for example State of Decay, based on what your Steam application language is. It's silly.

Why is defaulting to the user's implicit choice silly? Where there are two possible defaults for a game to use (OS or Steam), the Steam language setting is closer to the game, so it should use that. For most users it'll be correct.

It shd allow that you can choose. Most media content is better in the English original then in some dubbed translates version. The UI doesnt matter what language (apart from understandable by then reader)

Most media content is better in the English original then in some dubbed translates version.

You say that because you speak English. If you don't then obviously English is much worse than even a poor translation. Game developers have to take that in to account - using the user's Steam language setting means they can definitely read that language, so putting the game in that to start with should work for them.

The app has to default to something even if the game enables the user to change the setting. Using the user's Steam language is a more sensible starting point for most users than "Everyone gets English". That just completely ignores 80% of the world's population.

As for the quality of the translation, the solution for that is for developers to make better translations.

I fully agree. I just meant it shd be easy to change language.

> The app has to default to something

Not really. They could pop up a language selection dialog on first use, like many installers have done for ages.

> Using the user's Steam language is a more sensible starting point for most users than "Everyone gets English". That just completely ignores 80% of the world's population.

I'm pretty sure much more than 20% of the world's population is fluent in English. It's the language of the western world and the global economy, after all.

> As for the quality of the translation, the solution for that is for developers to make better translations.

Like the market ever cared about distributed failures like these. Every studio uses a different translation group, they can't really verify the final product, and the translators will happily save money doing shoddy work. Not to mention, the workflow isn't usually optimized for correct translations. To do this right, you'd have to have the translation team play through the entire game at least once to understand the whole picture, and only then have them work together on translating the text and audio. No single-pass translations, and no dividing the work between multiple people that don't talk to each other. I.e. more expensive. At the same time, the studio will get 90% of the profit (which happens at the point of sale, not at the completion of the experience) with a shitty translation anyway.

Maybe language for business/tech and hobby/life is different.

> As for the quality of the translation, the solution for that is for developers to make better translations.

Translation is inherently lossy.

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