I just discovered Mullvad (just a VPN provider) and for some reason, they don't have "English" in the list of languages available for their site.
So they redirected me to the Dutch version because I'm in a nominally Dutch-speaking region, and I had no option to get it in English. I had to go with half-translated French until I noticed that I could replace the "fr" in the URL with "en", and actually get to an English-language website.
The region-based redirection was annoying enough, and the half-assed translation job was expected, but not even providing an easy way to get back to English is really idiotic.
I still wish I had some kind of system that would automatically use a connection in the right country for geoblocked content. For now I just use SSH proxies to (my own) strategically located servers combined with Firefox Containers and Container Proxies, but it's all manual.
Just checked it, and English is 4th option in the language switcher on the bottom of the page.
Also, it seems to be using browser's preferred locale, not the IP region. So, it looks like that changed, too.
Google, on the other hand, is just as bad as you described. Geo-based localisation, lots of clicks to change the language (or ?hl=en, once you learn about it).
Looks like you're right, but unfortunately the select is cut for me[0] because my screen is not big enough.
Since the list is not alphabetically ordered (it actually is, but with the English names, not the displayed names) and it shows no scrollbar, it wasn't obvious there would be other countries up there.
As for language, maybe Google itself chose to send me to the Dutch version. Despite all my attempts, I still cannot consistently get Google to use the language I want (apart from manually choosing it by directly visiting Google with the right hl= first, indeed). Right now Google.fr seems to be in English and offering me the three languages of Belgium, for some reason.
So they redirected me to the Dutch version because I'm in a nominally Dutch-speaking region, and I had no option to get it in English. I had to go with half-translated French until I noticed that I could replace the "fr" in the URL with "en", and actually get to an English-language website.
The region-based redirection was annoying enough, and the half-assed translation job was expected, but not even providing an easy way to get back to English is really idiotic.
I still wish I had some kind of system that would automatically use a connection in the right country for geoblocked content. For now I just use SSH proxies to (my own) strategically located servers combined with Firefox Containers and Container Proxies, but it's all manual.