Why is he on the English website for Chrome in the first place?
I'm in Central America often. When downloading Chrome, I get redirected to the Spanish site. OK, so I explicitly find the English page. Download. So far, everything in English. Then Chrome itself inside the downloader overrides all that and installs in Spanish. The only way to override is to ensure I'm on a proxy.
I'd love to know the statistics of people overriding Google's localized site (forcing google.com in English versus local Google site), overriding the Chrome page (change the URL to have "en" wherever needed), running an OS in English (with no alternative keyboards), that still want it in the language of whatever country they're in.
Not to mention, this falls flat in multilingual countries.
You mean pirated Windows system defaults? Because legally you buy localized copies, and when you install any popular Linux distro choosing the language is one of first steps if not the first.
IMO, browsers should pick up your OS language settings by default OR make it very simple to both see what your browser default is and to change it. (without an add on)
I live in the UK, but I'm a US ex-pat so I get snared with i18n problems quite a bit when it comes to addresses on my US accounts.
It gets worse because I forget to change my browser to en-GB, and I come across US run .co.uk sites that rely on accept-languages to assume the format of my postcode. sigh...
Chrome does this guy a huge service by translating a lot of websites to something he can read. So what if it pisses off a few travellers? There are a lot more native Thais in Thailand than there are foreigners.