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Comment by trwired | Hacker News Reader

This is not related directly to the announcement, but touches on a thing that infuriates me to no end - for some reason the site assumed that because I live in the EU and relatively close to German border, I speak German and presented the site in that language. Despite my high-school teacher's heroic efforts, I can at best understand a few basic phrases. I didn't even know what to click in the cookie pop-up to kindly ask them to not track me.

Language auto detection^W assumption is such an anti-feature.

/rant

edit: I see I am not alone, who got hit by this.

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Google is particularly bad about this, they basically make it impossible to get normal English-language results if you're in another country, unless you mess with the URL parameters (gl=us).

Like if you're in Germany, you can set Google's language to English, but you're gonna get mainly German results for any search. A bizarre choice.

I'm German, I live in Germany, and I too hate this behaviour. I rarely want out of date badly translated variations of the original US topics.

It's myopic by google. I speak more than one language, "belong" to more than one country, but google makes it very hard to find relevant results that are not narrowed-down to the country I'm in right now.

It's not because you're close to the German border. Apparently anyone anywhere else in the EU except France gets redirected to the German website. (France is the only other EU country where Framework decided to open sales.)

I'm surprised things like "preferred language" aren't built into HTTP yet, seems to have a natural home in the user-agent corner of that world.

Actually there is a header for this purpose [Accept-Language on MDN](https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ac...).

But some sites just don't care about it and try detect this base on other information.

edit: formatting

I believe Google (used to?) ignores it if it's set to only English because that's too often the default. If that's the case, the work around is to set a second preferred language.

There is the Accept-Language header: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ac...

I guess this is sarcasm but if not:

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ac...

Surprise! Not everyone on HN is in webdev. I don't know much about how this all works but surveyed my user-agent-switcher utility and found no such language options.

The option should be in your OS or browser settings.

No need for any add-ons or extensions, you can set it the browser directly, although most websites these days ignore it anyway.

It's actually controlled by the Languages setting in your browser. Both Chrome and Firefox let you set the list of languages sent in the header, along with the order.

Doesn't exactly do a lot of good. Sites tend to ignore it, at least from what I've seen.

The first thing I do on any new installation is peruse the settings and tweak to my liking. It seems I missed that option, being privileged to have English as a mother tongue.

I believe HTTP has had this feature since 1999 as the Accept-Language header defined in the HTTP/1.1 RFC[0].

As for why it does not get used, MDN suggests[1] it's because changing it may lead to fingerprinting but there are likely other historical reasons.

[0]: https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2616#section-14.4

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ac...

Accept-Language: fr-CH, fr;q=0.9, en;q=0.8, de;q=0.7, *;q=0.5

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Headers/Ac...

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