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Multilingual Gecko Status Update 2018.2

Welcome to the third edition of Multilingual Gecko Status Update!

In the previous update we covered the work which landed in Firefox 59 and Firefox 60.

At the time, we’ve been finalizing the platform work to support Fluent localization system, and we were in the middle of migration of the first Firefox UI component – Preferences – to it.

Today, we’ll pick up right where we left off!

Firefox 61 (June)

Firefox 61 fits into the trend of things calming down in Intl – and it’s a great news! It means that we are reaching platform maturity after all the groundbreaking refactors in 2017, and we all can focus on the work on top of the modules, rather than playing whack-a-mole fixing bugs and adding missing features.

The biggest platform change is really just an update to ICU 61 which Andre landed in March and my work on adding mozIntl.RelativeTimeFormat and mozIntl.getLocaleDisplayNames.

The former gave us a stable unified API for presenting relative time (such as “In 5 minutes” or “10 days ago”) while the latter unified how we present language, region and combinations of those in our user interface based on the Unicode CLDR representation (example: “English (United States)”).

As I explained in my earliest posts, one of the things I’m particularly proud of is that we go the extra mile to use every such opportunity to not only fix the immediate Firefox UI need, but also push such proposals for standardization and in result make the Web Platform more complete.

In this case, Intl.RelativeTimeFormat has been proposed and thanks to amazing work by Daniel Ehrenberg is now in Stage 3 and soon will be exposed to all web developers in all browsers! Intl.getLocaleDisplayNames is less mature but the work on it just picked up.

Firefox migration to Fluent reached its next milestone moving from just a couple messages to over 100 Fluent messages in Firefox!

Notable changes [my work] [intl module]:

Firefox 62 (September)

Another calm cycle! The biggest feature was the introduction of the pseudolocalization in Firefox which I blogged about, and landing of the developer documentation.

The documentation has been insanely useful in distributing knowledge and helping engineers feel more comfortable working with the new stack, and I’m very happy we reached a stage where landing a documentation is the big news 🙂

In the Fluent land we spent the March-May timeframe moving from a 100 messages to 500 Fluent messages in Firefox!

Notable changes [my work] [intl module]:

Firefox 63 (October)

This cycle was quite similar to the previous one, with a bulk of work going into regular maintenance and cleanups.

For my work, the trend is to start integrating Fluent deeper into Gecko with more work around L10nRegistry v1 limitations and getting deeper DOM integration to improve XUL performance.

In this cycle I landed a XPCOM mozIDOMLocalization API which allows us to call Fluent from C++ and was required for a bigger change that we landed in Firefox 64.

One new theme is Kris Maglione who started working on reducing the performance and memory overhead coming from the old StringBundle API (used for .properties). With all the new work centralized around Fluent, but with a large portion of our strings still using StringBundle, it becomes a great target for optimizations by cutting out everything we don’t use and now we know – we never will.

Notable changes [my work] [intl module]:

Firefox 64 (December)

This release, is still getting stabilized and will get released in December, but the work cycle on it happened between September and October, so I can already provide you an account of that work!

Besides of a regular stack of cleanups coming from Henri and me, we’ve seen Ehsan Akhgari taking over from Kris to remove more lines of unused code.

The really big change was the introduction of DocumentL10n API which is a C++ API with its own WebIDL tightly integrated into the very core of DOM module in Gecko – nsIDocument.

Before that Fluent lived in Gecko in some form of a glorified javascript library. While it is Fluent’s goal to target the web platform, Firefox UI is inherently different from the web content and benefits from better integration between the DOM and its localization component.

This change allowed us to better integrate localization into the document’s life cycle, but what’s even more important, it allowed us to expose Fluent to documents that usually do not have special privileges and could not access Fluent before.

As for migration, we moved along nicely bumping from 500 to around 800 messages thanks to hard work of a number of students mentored by Jared Wein and Gijs Kruitbosch. The students picked up work on the migration as their Capstone project.

Notable changes [my work] [intl module]:

Summary

2018 has been much “easier” for the intl module than 2017 was. It’s great to see the how all pieces fit together and for me personally, it enabled me to focus on getting Fluent better integrated into Gecko.

There’s still a lot of work but it now is fully focused on Fluent and localization, while our intl module as a whole goes through a more well earned peaceful period.

Between now and the next status update, I hope to publish a summary post about the last two years of work. Stay tuned!