637650 - Use KiB and Mib instead of kB and MB

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Thunderbird :: Folder and Message Lists, defect)

Description

[Hugo Osvaldo Barrera]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b11) Gecko/20110209 Firefox/4.0b11
Build Identifier: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; en-US; rv:1.9.2.13) Gecko/20101210 Remi/fc14 Lightning/1.0b3pre Thunderbird/3.1.7

When I display the size column in the e-mail pane, it always reports the sizes in kB, this in annoying because that means I have e-mails that show "291762kB".  "284MB".  Of course messages this big are few, but messages > 10MiB are common.

This might also be even better if we used Kibibytes (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibibyte) and Mebibytes which is the standard way to measure bytes, instead of the SI prefixes, which are so often used wrong nowdays, that one doesn't know if 1kB = 1000B or 1024B in this case.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. Enable the size column in the message view
2. Look for a messages > 20000kB
Actual Results:  
I see 291762kB

Expected Results:  
I see 284MB

Comment 1

[[:Aureliano Buendía]]

It's fixed in TB 3.3.*

Comment 2

[Hugo Osvaldo Barrera]

Sorry, I failed to find that bug while searching before, that closes the first part of this bug.

The second part of this bug is still not fixed though: using Kibibytes and Mebibytes (which are 1024, and 1024²) is a far better idea than using kilo and Mega (which are 1000 and 1000000), since only hard-drive manufacturers use the latter and most OS'es, file managers, etc. use the former.

Comment 3

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

That implementation does use 1024 rather than 1000.

Comment 4

[Mark Banner (:standard8)]

(and I'd doubt we'd change the UI to KiB/Mib as I suspect most people wouldn't understand what that meant).

Comment 5

[Hugo Osvaldo Barrera]

Ticket 516787 does not reference this problem.

If the implementation calculates the sizes in KiB and MiB, but SAYS KB and MB, then it's worse than before, the size is now calculated in one measuring system, and the UI displays another.  That's awfully wrong, it shows confusing data.

Comment 6

[Hugo Osvaldo Barrera]

Why won't this severe issue get fixed, could you please explain?  Showing wrong information on the UI may not be URGENT, but should not be left as-is.

Comment 7

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

See comment 4

Comment 8

[Hugo Osvaldo Barrera]

What do you mean "most people won't understand that that meant"?  These are standard unit used worldwide in everyday software.  What's the point of fixing bug 516787 if the units are wrong?

Additionally, people will ASSUME a mail that says 100MB is 100 000 000B, when it's actually 104857600B.  The difference is small, but the fix to this is even smaller.