Why does the 404 page on Meta have Chinese text?

AI-generated summary

A user reported seeing Chinese text on the 404 page of Meta, despite their browser settings being set to English. notriddle shared their HTTP headers and JavaScript console output, which showed that their language was set to “en-US”. The issue seemed to be specific to Linux, as their Windows VM did not exhibit the same behavior. simon explained that the issue was caused by the “set locale from accept language header” setting being enabled on Meta, which can cause problems with the anonymous cache on public sites using a CDN. The setting has been disabled to resolve the issue.

I’m using Firefox on Linux. Everything other than the headers is in English.

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Can’t reproduce from my side. Can you say more about your system’s location and/or language settings? Any reason why something might be detecting Chinese language?

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It seems to be Linux-specific. My Windows VM doesn’t do it.

headers on Linux

According to another website, I’m sending these HTTP headers:

ACCEPT text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,/;q=0.8
ACCEPT-ENCODING gzip, deflate, br
ACCEPT-LANGUAGE en-US,en;q=0.5
HOST www.whatismybrowser.com
REFERER https://duckduckgo.com/
TE trailers
UPGRADE-INSECURE-REQUESTS 1
USER-AGENT Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0

And according to the JavaScript console, this is the language:

"en-US"
headers on Windows

According to another website, I’m sending these HTTP headers:

ACCEPT text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,image/webp,/;q=0.8
ACCEPT-ENCODING gzip, deflate, br
ACCEPT-LANGUAGE en-US,en;q=0.5
HOST www.whatismybrowser.com
TE trailers
UPGRADE-INSECURE-REQUESTS 1
USER-AGENT Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:72.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/72.0

And according to the JavaScript console, this is the language:

"en-US"

The weird part is that it’s inconsistent. The primary header is in English, it’s just those subheaders that are localized.

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Thanks for reporting this. It is because the set locale from accept language header setting has been enabled on Meta. That setting causes issues with the anonymous cache and should not be enabled on public sites that are using a CDN. For details about the issue, see Swedish? meta just showed me the UI in Swedish.

I’ll disable that setting on Meta now.

6 Likes

Okay, so it has nothing to do with my Linux or Windows setup. That’s a relief…

2 Likes