Daily Archives: November 1, 2014


Language preference and cookies

Webmasters: Please keep the language choice into a cookieOne can not like cookies, but they can in some situations be very useful. I have as preference in my browser the languages in the following order: English, Portuguese, French.

In Switzerland with several national languages most websites have by default the German language. First time I visit them I change to French or English. Second time I visit the same website I would expect that he remembers that I read the website in other language than German. Unfortunately this is not the case.

Webmasters should think about using cookies to keep the language preference of the user. I see none in Switzerland doing it.

Some sites have different web addresses depending the language they target – meteosuisse.ch, meteoschweiz.ch or cff.ch, sbb.ch, ffs.ch. This works well. But the remaining – coop.ch and sunrise.ch – always in German; swisscom.ch – defaults to browser language, english site for me; migros.ch, orange.ch – defaults to browser language, german site if brower asks english…

Dear webmasters: please use cookies instead of obliging the user to change language each time he visits your website!