On 12/3/2012 5:39 PM, Norbert Lindenberg wrote:
OK, just as an introduction, why we're doing this: The ECMAScript
Internationalization API (which has been approved by Ecma TC 39 and is on track
to become an Ecma standard next week) provides web applications with the
ability to format numbers, dates, and times and sort strings according to the
rules of the language that the application is using, not the one that browser
and OS default to. Many users are multilingual and go to web sites in different
languages, and even users who aren't sometimes have to use browsers that don't
support their language. The API in addition lets applications tailor the
results to their specific needs, e.g., specify the currency with which numbers
are displayed, select the date-time components used in a date format, or ignore
punctuation in sorting.
To implement that, we need good library support, and ICU fits the bill.
If I may be a skeptic:
Is this feature really worth the costs? Right now xul.dll is about 18MB
on Windows, and the entire install size of Firefox on disk is 91MB.
Assuming that the weight is roughly similar to mac, we'd be talking a
15% increase in on-disk size for a feature which seems on the surface to
be relatively obscure. Maybe it would be better to just not implement
this EMCA specification? What does this feature really buy us in terms
of strategic importance?
How well do the data files compress? Even more important than the
installed size, a 15% increase in download size could have a noticeable
impact on our install conversion rates.
--BDS
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