Firefox:2.0 Multi-locale Installers

Synopsis

When we ship the Firefox product currently, we can only fit one locale per installer which leads to duplicating the same binary code for multiple locales. If we could fit more than one locale per installer, we could place ourselves in a much better situation where a 20-locale Firefox installer may be ~20 MB instead of 100 MB. Since we ship 3 platforms, that takes our total size from 300 MB to 60 MB.

This is the difference between shipping Firefox, Thunderbird, and Suite on the same CD, or having to split them up onto multiple CDs.

User:Beltzner/Specification_of_Stub_Installer_User_Interface

Shishen's Comments

Not only the installer should be multi-locale but the installed software too. Given Firefox runs on multi-users systems, each user might prefer to use Firefox in his own language.

Caleb's Comments

It would be great if the strings would be external, so if say, there's a minor security update coming up, users with locales other than en-US could apply the security fix without having to wait for a version of Firefox in their locale. Since after all, incremental security updates are not allowed to change anything major in the interface, and even if they do, the patch could be applied in en-US first (not localizing the new strings, but leaving the old ones intact) and when a language pack is available it will update the rest of the strings.

Holizz's Comments

... if say, there's a minor security update coming up, users with locales other than en-US could apply the security fix without having to wait for a version of Firefox in their locale.

Isn't that's what happens already? I downloaded 1.5 beta 1 in en-GB. When I updated to 1.5 it was still en-GB despite the en-GB installer not being available until several weeks later.

Pike's Comments

In the update szenario, there is no replacement for QA. It's not the bits that are the problem, but QAing that the bits work.

Multiple-locale installs require that all localized files, like bookmarks and search engines are in locale-dependent places, which they're not right now. Known bug, though I don't think someone filed them yet. Not sure if this is 2.0 material.