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Comment by rickmb | Hacker News Reader

This kind of thing pisses me off regularly. Google is one of the worst offenders, completely ignoring browser language preferences.

But American websites in general are awful at this. They completely ignore local diversity and sensitivities and simply assume "one country, one language", so they will for instance happily present Flemish users with French interfaces.

It's fucking offensive. If I type google.com instead of google.nl or google.de or google.co.jp and my browser preferred language is English, I have made it pretty damn clear what I want.

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Do the sites in question even have Flemish interfaces?

Flemish is a dialect of Dutch and therefore they should present a Dutch language interface if available, but really the only sensible thing to do when detecting a Belgian IP is defaulting to English (or browser preference) and making it really easy to switch to other languages.

Google has been OK for me (except when it starts to display in German out of the blue), but other sites like myspace are pathetic. In a country where the majority speaks Dutch, they default to French and make it very confusing to change the language.

It is slightly more offensive to assume that .com + browser settings == english above the country you are originating from, if you aren't speaking english, anyway.

> .com + browser settings == english

Browsers are often configured improperly and it's not always practical to rely on them but it definitely isn't offensive to follow the explicit preferences sent by the browser.

Really? The country I'm visiting from says nothing definitive about my language of choice. Absolutely nothing.

Choosing google.com instead of google.nl however is a clear choice. Setting the preferred language of my browser is an even more explicit choice.

How can honoring explicit choices be more offensive than assuming the visitor is an idiot who can't think for themselves?

"Choosing google.com instead of google.nl however is a clear choice."

No it isn't, .com is the global domain, not the english one.

True, but even Google.us, which abolutely is an American domain extension, is set to thai for me.

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