Safari locale doesn't match system locale

Question

Safari locale doesn't match system locale

I noticed multiple sites pre-selecting the wrong country when I visit them: The Netherlands instead of Belgium. Today I checked this in the Javascript console and my navigator.language variable is set to "nl-nl". This of course explains why this is happening.

However, my system locale was left unchanged. It's still configured as Belgium - Dutch. And the Terminal environment is also correct: LANG=nl-BE.UTF-8.

I don't know when this came to be like that, but I suspect one of the last Mavericks updates. I'm running 10.9.4 with Safari 7.0.5 (9537.77.4). Anyone else also facing this issue and found a solution? I already tried trashing the Safari preferences but that didn't help.

Posted on Jul 10, 2014 2:51 PM

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Answer 1

Linc Davis

Level 10

209,547 points

Jul 10, 2014 4:19 PM in response to Wouter Cuypers

From the Safari menu bar, select

Safari ▹ Preferences... ▹ Privacy ▹ Remove All Website Data

and confirm. Test.

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Answer 2

Jul 11, 2014 12:15 PM in response to Linc Davis

Hi Linc,

Thanks for your reply.

I tried that, but it didn't help. We found out that Safari completely ignores the 'country' part of the system settings. If you select Belgium-French it sends "fr-fr" instead of "fr-be" as its Accept-Language header in HTTP (checked using Charles on multiple Macs). It also sends just 1 language instead of all languages set in System Preferences. Even worse: Safari on iOS shows the same behavior.

Chrome and Firefox do it correctly though. It's quite unfortunate that Apple doesn't send a correct Accept-Language header. Now we have to count on geo-IP to detect from which country or region a user is coming from.

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