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Comment by bun_terminator | Hacker News Reader

God yes. It's still an uphill battle trying to convince my PC that I indeed want to have english-everything, although my PC is in europe. And boy do some websites go through hoops to be "clever"

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I can kind of see why this is all the case: IP geolocating can be assumed to be generally useful, locale settings expressed by the browser and/or operating system could have been explicitly set or just left as what they came out of the box and thus unreliable.

That said: There's a reason I am going to google.com and not google.co.jp, fucking thanks fucking good day fucking fuck.

It is a faulty assumption that IP geolocation is generally useful. It's often not, at all. The only context in which it might seem so is if you live on an English speaking continent. Otherwise, you're going to constantly misidentify people who live near borders, who use a VPN, or who have a different language preference than the offical language where their ISP is located. Locale settings expressed by the browser are the user's explicit preference, and extremely reliable. When was the last time you unboxed a new device, and on the very first OS setup screen when you have to choose your language preference, you chose a language that you don't speak? No one does that! And when was the last time you had to use a device that wasn't yours and had the language set to a language you don't speak? Never! So I don't know where you got this idea that somehow the majority of people are using devices that are set to a language that they don't speak.

>Locale settings expressed by the browser are the user's explicit preference,

From experience watching other people use computers, most people don't even know WTF "locale" is or anything even tangentially related. More than likely they just use whatever was configured by default, which most of the time makes sense for them but it's not a given.

Hence, it's unreliable.

IP geolocation on the other hand, you can at least assume the broad region where they are connecting from (VPNs and proxies aside).

That "default" is typically set by the language choice in the OS, which is exactly why it is reliable, because people understand language selectors just fine.

I know precisely zero people who know how to change the OS's language settings, assuming they weren't already knowledgable with computers.

> boy do some websites go through hoops to be "clever"

1. I'm in (east of) France geo

2. My system is set to en_GB

Yet some websites insist in putting me in Germany. Sometimes it even changes between requests (web pages), some are extra nutty and I even get mixed content within the same page.

For the love of all that is holy, please stop being clever. UAs have had Accept-Language headers ever since RFC3282. Use that hint.

> I indeed want to have english-everything

english + metric || gtfo

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