On Dec 6, 2012, at 16:08 , Asa Dotzler wrote: > On 12/3/2012 2:39 PM, Norbert Lindenberg wrote: >> Well, the first question is what size increase would be acceptable >> given the benefits that ICU provides. > > I don't understand what benefits this actually provides. How are users' > online lives improved by this change, either today or in the future? > > Adding to the download size costs us in user acquisition so we cannot be OK > with taking on megabytes of additional download size for features of > questionable value.
The benefit is that the ECMAScript Internationalization API lets developers create a more consistent localized experience for their users, with the correct date, time, and number formats, the culturally appropriate calendar, correct currency symbols, and correct sorting. It also helps avoid latency by removing the need to send lists back to the server for sorting. The functionality provided by the ECMAScript Language Specification for this purpose is basically useless, because the behavior of its locale-sensitive functions is totally unpredictable. There are a number of JavaScript libraries for number and date formatting, but they require applications to load these libraries and the associated locale data, and their coverage for different calendars, time zones, and currencies is usually very limited (and where there's more, you pay with a bigger download size). As far as I know, there's no JavaScript library that supports localized sorting, so the only solution for applications is to do all sorting on the server. Google has already implemented the Internationalization API and is shipping it in Chrome (still prefixed in Chrome 23), also by bundling ICU into their downloads. User acquisition is an important goal of course. Has Mozilla studied how it correlates with download size, e.g., by measuring what percentage of users cancel out of downloads if the size is artificially inflated? Also, when I tried to get download size numbers on Windows, I couldn't get a number for Chrome, but I noticed that there were fewer messages about security risks and fewer buttons to click than for Firefox. What impact does this have on user acquisition? Norbert _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
