888071 - Change download speed measurement from bytes per second to bits per second

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Firefox :: Downloads Panel, enhancement)

Description

[Josh Tumath]

Currently, download speeds are given as bytes per second (B/s). However, this seems counter-intuitive, as most ordinary users are used to dealing with download speeds in terms of bits per second.

When you're comparing ISPs, they will tell you their connection speeds in Mb/s. If you take a speedtest on Web sites such as speedtest.net, they will tell you your speed in Mb/s. If you go on a utility app such as the Windows Task Manager, it will tell you networking speeds in Mb/s.

When an ordinary user sees a statistic such as "240 KB/s" in the downloads manager, this is useless to them, as they are used to dealing with bit units rather than byte units. Therefore, I propose Firefox uses Mb/s for showing download speeds.

Comment 1

[Dave Garrett]

God no. Yes, it's annoying that ISPs pick the bigger sounding number for their marketing, in the same way that it's annoying that hard drive manufacturers use GB instead of GiB. That being said, all files are measured in bytes and that's what people actually interact with for everything. When I see my 90 MB file downloading at 3 MB/s I know it's going to take 30 seconds. There's no practical reason users should have to constantly be dividing by 8 in their heads to figure out how fast their file is coming down. Yes, I'm aware it also shows a guess at remaining time, however the whole point of showing the speed at all (which was not a given in the new UI) is to show an actual indicator of the speed, which necessitates showing the speed in the same units the file size shown next to it is in. The file size is in bytes so the speed shown next to it needs to be in bytes too.

Comment 2

[Josh Tumath]

OK. That seems like a valid argument for why things should remain the way they are.