> > I recall from our previous investigations that a significant amount of the > file size increase came from libxul. >
Definitely so: Bug 1115000 is the most recent "wha?" bug. On the other hand, we can't only point at libxul here: our own code, our own resources, our locale count, and the size of our dependencies (Play in particular) have all been growing. What can we do to prevent platform code from pinning us in a place where we > are unable to develop Firefox for Android effectively? Well, we have two broad options: don't tie ourselves to the platform, or tie the platform to us. (We're currently tied to the platform, which is the worst of both worlds.) Tying the platform to us would effectively mean having veto power over the landing — or development! — of platform features. We do that to an extent today (the network seer backout being one example), but usually too late and only via build flags. Moreover, it also implies making Gecko engineers think about this kind of stuff; my experience suggests that most desktop developers don't really take even bandwidth and power usage too seriously, let alone "only a few hundred KB", so there's room for improvement there. I would love to see a talos-alike that went orange if you made the build larger. AWSY reports APK sizes correlated with commits, but of course going from that to a useful automated finger-point isn't trivial. Additionally, I suspect that this is (at least in part) death by a thousand cuts: myriad small increases adding up to a lot, which makes dealing with the growth more difficult. This would be a worthwhile discussion to have on something like dev-platform, if anyone has the mental energy for it. Getting from consensus to action might be challenging, and getting to consensus probably requires research. I don't see a specific number trend other than up. Trying to predict the > date of the 50MB threshold seems fraught with problems. Though it is a > significant concern. Having a better historical breakdown might be useful > as well as the growth of libxul and other gecko bits vs the androidy bits. > Though that sounds like quite a bit of work to me. Yeah, that's why I didn't do it. My speculative date was intended to be a little bit like the "2°C" number in climate change discussions: it kinda doesn't matter exactly what the number is, or exactly when we'll hit it… there's a number, and we're heading strongly in its direction. We've grown 22MB in less than three years. We have 10MB of padding in which to change direction. Growing *any further* is undesirable, regardless of that padding; we really ought to start paddling before we find out exactly how far away the waterfall is.
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