As another multilingual person, I keep getting reminded how bad software "features" can be for us. First, from early computers up to at least the Windows XP era, things sucked due to code pages and all that, but that was understandable, technical limitations after all. Now things suck due to what's supposed to be convenient UX.

Google Chrome broke Ctrl-F functionality for my native language ages ago and it's still broken because the breakage is apparently by design.

The Amazon website for my country appears to mostly auto-translate the English product pages into the local language. Product titles sometimes mean totally ridiculous things because of course the translation is poor.

Nobody cares about the Accept-Language header. Way too many websites like to use GeoIP and switch to the local language. Sometimes the geolocation is wrong, sometimes their location-language mappings are, and even when everything is working "correctly" it's a pain if I'm traveling. I have my browser set up with a correct Accept-Language list, but during travel I definitely see websites switch to a language I can't read.

Then of course there's the huge problem, related to autodetection, that you cannot deduce a user's language from their residence. Countries don't have a surjective mapping onto languages.

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Siecje 4 days ago | parent [-]

Why is ctrl-f broken?

	▲	ACS_Solver 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		Because it ignores diacritics. Searching for ā will find a, searching for š will highlight s. This may make sense for some languages where diacritics are used sparingly to indicate an aspect of pronunciation, but in my language and many others diacritics are used for entirely different letters. The letter ā is not a. Treating them as equivalent makes as little sense as treating e and o as equivalent would in English. If I'm trying to find kāzas (wedding) in a page, I will get hits for kazas (goats). If I'm looking for šauš, a letter sequence that words about shooting begin with, I will also get hits in šausmas (horror) or sauss (dry). It's nonsense. Windows 3.1 notepad.exe could find the actual word I entered in a text file (though the input required setup), the dominant browser in 2025 cannot do that and finds entirely unrelated words because an English speaker has decided they're visually similar.