Hacker News Reader

Comment by Dalewyn | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com