On 10/13/14 4:54 PM, Chris More wrote:
Does anyone know or could any of you create a breakdown of the major blocks of
the Firefox installer and each of their respective sizes or percentage of the
whole?
For example, the win32 installer for Firefox 32 is 34MB. The Firefox Growth
team [1] like to know of that 34MB, what is the percentage or size of each of
the components within the 34MB. As for the granularity of the breakdown, it
would be by some logic way of breaking down Firefox. For example, SpiderMonkey,
tools, XUL, etc. I'll leave the granularity up to you on what you consider a
logic block to quantify together.
Why am I asking this?
The win32 Firefox full installer continues to grow (see attachment) each
release and it has been on an increasing growth since Firefox 29. Like anything
on the web, the time it takes to download something (webpage, binary file,
etc.) affects the key conversion rate by some amount. The Firefox Growth team
has a project to understand what features/changes in Firefox are contributing
to the growth or size of the installer. We've asked a few times previously, but
it doesn't look like the documentation or analysis exist.
Would anyone be able to take on this project as it would be very helpful to the
team? I am imagining a pie chart of the the current installer and then a table
of the name of each component, their size (KB or MB), and any additional meta
data.
If you are looking for ideas on how to reduce download size, the way
omni.ja is included in the installer could be reduced by 4+ MB. Both
omni.ja and browser/omni.ja are zip archives, where each file has a
separate compression context. If you treat all files from those two
archives as a single compression context (like tar+bz2) and stuff them
in a single archive, you get size reductions of 4+ MB due to the
compression engine sharing state between files. We can't install omni.ja
like this on client systems because it is bad for performance (we want
the ability to extract individual files without reading a large
compression context - this is a benefit of the zip format). But we could
ship the files optimized for size (or have installer's compression
handle the files individually) and have the installer re-encode them to
omni.ja so they are optimized for performance.
I'm not sure if this has been considered or attempted before. Things are
slightly complicated by the fact that omni.ja is a slightly customized
zip format. We'd need to ship code to encode omni.ja.
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