Musings on software globalization

Really, Chrome? September 24, 2011

With the terrible bloat in Firefox, I have recently been trying to get used to Chrome. I am having a really hard time, though. I appreciate the attempt to create an uncluttered interface, but please – within limits!

Once I finally managed to find the settings, I had to hunt around for ever to find the setting for default encoding. I first looked under Basics, but no luck. Went on to Advanced Options, and found no specific setting there. The Languages and Spell checker button seemed the most likely, but no, I didn’t find it there either.

Where does it hide? Under “Customize Fonts…”, of course.

If I were using the English language UI, I might actually have thought that location far-fetched, but not totally outlandish. Since I am using the Danish language version, however, the connection is just completely impossible to make:

The Danish button says “Customize font sizes…”.  And while it is true that good translations cannot be word-for-word translations, in this case my advice to the Danish translator would be to stay a little closer to the source text.

Another case where the Danish translation would benefit from a few changes:

The first sentence (Det ser ud som om, at du er flyttet”) is not wrong, but it would sound a lot more natural without the “at”. And the second one is just plain wrong – again, a superfluous “at”.  Otherwise the translation looks pretty good. And my main question is actually not about the translation at all; all of this has just been throat clearing leading up to this:

Why on earth is the out-of-the-box default encoding still set to ISO-8859-1 for all the Western European languages, and to various other legacy encodings for languages using other scripts? With Unicode (UTF-8) having surpassed 50% of the web by now?