This is the worst. I was in France recently and tons of mobile websites were just suddenly in French. It was a real chore to read through them, and I can only imagine how frustrating this is when you can't read the language put in front of you at all.

This is always infuriating, because browsers send the Accept-Language header, that these sites just ignore.

The thing I don't get is that there are plenty of Googlers traveling internationally. They've been aware of the problem for over a decade now, yet it persists. If I'm traveling from Spain to Poland with a browser set to use UK-English, why would the site immediately switch to Polish? It makes no sense that this common corner case isn't addressed at all after all this time.

At the very least sites that do this should detect that there's a mismatch between expected language given geolocation and the header and have a toast notification about how to change the language settings back manually.

Just imagine the mess in Belgium!

Actually I can imagine that multilingualism would force the devs to rely on Accept-Language instead of GeoIP. Talking out of my arse here :)

One imagines the the large number of Indian and Chinese H1B workers at large tech companies are multi-lingual or at least bilingual.

It cuts in both ways.

I'm trying to learn the language of the country I now live in. And yet, Google thinks they know better than me, my preference, at the moment.

And this preference is quite circumstantial, mind you.