Locale Switcher

Patryk Szalanski

2022-02-03

Unfortunately, hardly unusable after the update. It takes at least 2 seconds to open up. The new visuals are kind of appealing, but I somehow have a harder time finding the buttons that I am looking for.

Stephan Mayer

2022-01-17

I've been happily using the locale switcher since long to quickly set the browser to a different language for development, testing or demo purposes. However, this new version renders this fine tool pretty much useless.

First of all, language switching is sometimes not working with this version. The old version, as soon as you selected a different language, immediately refreshed the page, reliably. Not this one. It sometimes just does not do anything, so you need to hit "F5" to actually force a reload of the page. Also it seems to get confused with the languages at times, for example loading French but displaying German on the icon when you switch back and forth a lot.

Just because one user wanted to have it per tab and not globally, you now need to select the language over and over again. Well, there is a reason why the language setting in the browser is global - it does not make a lot of sense to have it per tab (except for a few very specific use cases). I agree there are some really nice new features in this new version (like keyboard shortcuts or favorites), but having it per tab is probably not what most users want. While this was certainly done with best attempt, PLEASE restore the original functionality to allow language setting to be global again (should be default) and make "per tab" an optional setting.

Another flaw is the UI - I really do not get what the topmost switch control is supposed to switch on or off, and there is no explanation or tooltip. When you turn the switch on, it allows you select more than one language, but as soon as you click any of your carefully crafted and ordered languages, the list is all gone again?! If you want to allow for more than one language (falllback sequence), I'd recommend to allow users to create their own language profiles, that can then be selected like any language, but consist of a sequence of languages.

I sincerely hope these flaws and issues will be resolved soon, so the tool becomes again what it was: the most popular and easy-to use locale switcher plugin for Chrome. Meanwhile, what about making the old version available again as "locale switcher classic" for all the people that are missing the global feature?

Fernando Carmona

2022-01-13

Great extension, but the new version does not apply the switch to all tabs and it resets itself each time the browser (Chrome in my case) starts up. It was fine before....