Axel Hecht
2012-09-21 14:57:52 UTC
Hi,
here an update on how we plan to move forward with localizing Firefox
for Android, aka, Fennec. This is the outcome of digesting a ton of
ideas, and a call among Karen, Mark, Brad, Alex, Chris, and I.
The goal is to have a snappy product in a good number of languages by
Firefox 19.
"Snappy" comes with two constraints, startup time and download size.
Download size increases significantly with many localizations added, so
we'll work on reducing that impact. That work is tracked in [1], and is
engineered by the mobile team, with help from build peers, hopefully.
The other half of snappy is startup time, and that means that we can't
afford to have a locale selection independent of the Android settings.
Doing so apparently tears down much of the pre-created android process
and sets it up again, noticably slowing down startup.
That means that the list of locales that we're able to put into the
multi-locale build is limited by what Android supports. This is a
strange feeling for us, but we're going after the users that are on
Android, so that's OK.
The future of the single-locale builds isn't yet determined, but as long
as google play store doesn't support an APK per language, they'll not
prominently exposed. Using them on Nightly or Aurora is fine, though.
Practically, I'll work on separating the localizations that we're
shipping as Firefox from those we're not able to ship (yet) on the
dashboard. There will be one list of languages that go into the
multi-locale build, and that will be offered to sign-off etc, and there
will be the remaining list who'll continue to see builds on aurora and
nightly. This won't affect our builds really, it's just clarifying that
on the l10n dashboard.
Data which locales fall into which bucket are in [2].
We'll test extensively what we can achieve in both size and performance,
and then try to add a healthy amount of localizations to Firefox on Android.
Thanks for your support and patience, and sorry if the experience we can
create on Android in your language doesn't work out the way we all hoped.
Axel
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=792077
[2]
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platforms.mobile/gAmPESDpfQc
here an update on how we plan to move forward with localizing Firefox
for Android, aka, Fennec. This is the outcome of digesting a ton of
ideas, and a call among Karen, Mark, Brad, Alex, Chris, and I.
The goal is to have a snappy product in a good number of languages by
Firefox 19.
"Snappy" comes with two constraints, startup time and download size.
Download size increases significantly with many localizations added, so
we'll work on reducing that impact. That work is tracked in [1], and is
engineered by the mobile team, with help from build peers, hopefully.
The other half of snappy is startup time, and that means that we can't
afford to have a locale selection independent of the Android settings.
Doing so apparently tears down much of the pre-created android process
and sets it up again, noticably slowing down startup.
That means that the list of locales that we're able to put into the
multi-locale build is limited by what Android supports. This is a
strange feeling for us, but we're going after the users that are on
Android, so that's OK.
The future of the single-locale builds isn't yet determined, but as long
as google play store doesn't support an APK per language, they'll not
prominently exposed. Using them on Nightly or Aurora is fine, though.
Practically, I'll work on separating the localizations that we're
shipping as Firefox from those we're not able to ship (yet) on the
dashboard. There will be one list of languages that go into the
multi-locale build, and that will be offered to sign-off etc, and there
will be the remaining list who'll continue to see builds on aurora and
nightly. This won't affect our builds really, it's just clarifying that
on the l10n dashboard.
Data which locales fall into which bucket are in [2].
We'll test extensively what we can achieve in both size and performance,
and then try to add a healthy amount of localizations to Firefox on Android.
Thanks for your support and patience, and sorry if the experience we can
create on Android in your language doesn't work out the way we all hoped.
Axel
[1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=792077
[2]
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/mozilla.dev.platforms.mobile/gAmPESDpfQc