271826 - Use a more efficient compression algorithm for official Firefox/Thunderbird/SeaMonkey builds for OS X (bz2 instead of gzip)

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox Build System :: General, enhancement)

Description

[Martin Creutziger [:MMx]]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; de-DE; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041108 Firefox/1.0
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; de-DE; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20041108 Firefox/1.0

I suggest using a more efficient compression algorithm, such as bzip2, to
compress the official Mac OS X builds. 
This would result in a significantly reduced download size, around 1MB less for
Firefox/Thunderbird, even more for the suite.

Reproducible: Always
Steps to Reproduce:
1. got to the mozilla.org download page using a modem or ISDN
2. start downloading
3. wait for ever

Actual Results:  
Download takes too long

Expected Results:  
Download could be faster with BZIP2 instead of GZIP

I did some research on the support of BZIP2 in MacOS X and found out that the
shipped-with-OSX unpacking application, StuffIt Expander (www.stuffit.com),
supports BZIP2 at least since version 6.5, version 9.0 is shipping now.

As this is the one standard tool in MacOS for generations already, there should
not be any problem using BZIP2.

I have been using it for the German packages of Fire[bird|fox] and SeaMonkey for
over one year, and there were no complaints about it from the users in that time.

Comment 1

[Jo Hermans]

historical note: bug 169602 comment 5 mentioned that it was planned a long time
ago by Steve Dagley

Comment 2

[Jo Hermans]

this contradicts bug 242845

Comment 3

[Martin Creutziger [:MMx]]

(In reply to comment #2)
> this contradicts bug 242845

Yes, I know.
As it seems to that the decision is pro-ZLIB and contra-"downloadsize", I mark
this bug "WONTFIX". We can't have both at once, which is a pity. Nevertheless,
as I also want to make Firefox et al more user-friendly and close to Apple's
HIGs, I accept this decision.