As an avid VPN user it’s infuriating that multilingual websites insist on using the client’s IP address to determine their language and country when web browsers have been sending the Accept-Language HTTP header since the mid-90s.
I understand that you can work out more or less where someone is located based on their IP address but it was never meant to be a geo-based marker. Why not go the simple route and use the header?
Probably because it’s easier to track people that way.
Sure, but that could be decoupled from language/regional preferences.
When I travel to another country my smartphone doesn’t change its language to match that of the host country, so why don’t websites respect the user-defined preference defined in the header?
It was not that long ago when Android changed my on screen keyboard to a different layout whenever I was in a different country. Really annoying - I don’t suddenly type in Danish when I’m on a business trip to Lyngby (near Copenhagen)
No one is spending money to cater to a miniscule audience.
Doesn’t it cost less money to parse the header than to pay for an entire geolocation dataset?