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?
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?
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)