Force locale redirects

[peterbe]

A lot of people prefer a different locale (of en-US) than the one they click on. One very common example is a non-English user, who lives in France for example, who googles for something and since Google prefers localized content she's presented with a link to https://developer.mozilla.org/fr/docs/Apprendre/Commencer_avec_le_web which she clicks. Upon arrival, she realizes she prefers the English version so she has to click the language switcher to go over to https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Learn/Getting_started_with_the_web

She could have installed MDN Language Redirector but that's a pain.

[peterbe]

It would be much more convenient to ask the user, after they changed locale, "Do you prefer this language?" and if they say yes, put a thing into localStorage and now we can always do a check like this:

class App extends Component {
    componentDidMount() {
        var preferred = localStorage.getItem('preferred-locale')
        var current = this.getCurrentLocale()
        if (preferred && preferred !== current) {
            this.startReactRouterRedirectTo(preferred).then(() => {
               // alternatively use sessionStorage depend on how we do or don't use client-side navigation
               this.setState({redirectedFrom: current})
               
            })
        }
    }
}

This way we keep our server code much simpler and users won't have to register and sign in and besides a check like this doesn't require network, unlike a fetch('/api/v1/whoami') which is much much slower.

[peterbe]

Typical example: mdn/kuma#6166

[peterbe]

@escattone Would it be at all feasible to make our Lambda@Edge depend on a cookie? I know (with 90% certainty) that technically it's possible to have CloudFront take the cookie into account. But it might get messy.

We could implement something fairly easily, in the client code. If you arrive on a non-en-US page, you have access to localStorage and you have access to doc.translation_of so you could kick off a piece of code that does an in-page redirect based on the users' localStorage. Historically, we've seen a lot of people complain about this in Kuma but, at one point, we said this could be done "server-side" as a cool feature to justify signing in. Ie. instead of relying on localStorage you rely on /api/v1/whoami which tells the document that this user prefers some other locale.

At this point, it's more of a "product" decision rather than a matter of regular Yari redirect problems.