language customisation on web sites is always done badly and wrongly

As a person moves around the world, they encounter local languages where they go.  That is obvious.  Should a person's personal computing devices also switch to the local language?  Should their smartphone menus be in French when in France, German when in Germany, and Japanese when in Japan?  What about web sites?

Someone engaging in full immersion to learn a language might choose to do that.  Everyone else expects to be able to move around, and for their own computers to continue to talk to them in their language.

Web sites are especially bad at this.  They use geo-ip, make assumptions about the language based on the country, and present stuff in that language.  This extremely stupid technique might have been acceptable were there no other ways to determine the user's language.

HTTP has a header Accept-Language for this purpose.  And every request from major browsers tends to contain it.  That should be used with precedence over geo-ip.  But it's not --- not by Google, or anyone.

Worse, many services will fail to display the correct language, even when the user is logged in (or perhaps in the process of logging in), and the user has already set their language via their account settings.  This tends to only happen on tiny web sites, perhaps prototypes, with amateur web teams, with recently-observed examples including Google, Amazon, Ebay, and.. just about everyone else. 


Is there a reason everyone does this wrong?

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