On Thu, Sep 18, 2025 at 2:51 PM Mike Taylor <[email protected]> wrote:

> On 9/18/25 5:54 a.m., Philip Jägenstedt wrote:
>
> Some additional context. Upgrading ICU can break sites and it cannot be
> done with a flag because of the size of the library (two copies would be
> needed). To mitigate the risk, we'd like to use the Blink launch process
> going forward. Where we can identify a risk ahead of time, we can add a
> targeted flag for that, as we've done for Italian number formatting here.
>
> On Thu, Sep 18, 2025 at 11:40 AM Chromestatus <
> [email protected]> wrote:
>
>> *Contact emails*
>> [email protected], [email protected]
>>
>> *Explainer*
>> None
>>
>> *Specification*
>> https://tc39.es/ecma402
>>
>> *Design docs*
>>
>> https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/download/77.html
>> https://cldr.unicode.org/downloads/cldr-46
>> https://www.unicode.org/versions/Unicode16.0.0
>>
>> *Summary*
>> ICU is not a feature itself, but the third-party library we use for
>> general Unicode support. We are using the Blink launch process because
>> there is web compat risk and security considerations. The upgrade is from
>> ICU 74.2 to ICU 77.1, the current latest release. ICU 77 contains CLDR 46
>> and other changes to support Unicode 16. The web-exposed changes are mainly
>> the Intl and RegExp APIs, IDNA rules for URLs, and text segmentation. Intl
>> and RegExp (V8): Lots of small changes. The change of Italian number
>> formatting is the riskiest and has a dedicated flag, see compat risk
>> section. IDNA: Generally more things are allowed, and this upgrade improves
>> our overall test results in WPT. Text segmentation: The most interesting
>> change is better Japanese line breaking when using `word-break:
>> auto-phrase`, related to
>> https://chromestatus.com/feature/5133892532568064. All test changes are
>> explained in
>> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1lrfJJmWvLXYPYSYlxE3mXTgDZI9U1bw2FrJYrDorgqE/edit?usp=sharing
>
> This doc mentions changes to "added comma in en-GB in a date format" -
> where's the best place to see what that change looks like? This kind of
> change sounds pretty similar to
> https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40256057 (or go/omg-1414292-pm if you
> can read it (apologies to non-googlers)), and the type of things to easily
> break regular expressions
>

It shows up in two places in test changes in
https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/c/chromium/src/+/6578333.

The first is base/i18n/time_formatting_unittest.cc with these are the
changes:

"Saturday 30 April 2011 at 15:42:07" → "Saturday, 30 April 2011 at 15:42:07
"Saturday 30 April 2011" → "Saturday, 30 April 2011"

The other
is third_party/blink/web_tests/webexposed/intl-date-time-format-expected.txt
with this change:

"Wednesday 14 June 2023 at 14:50:00 British Summer Time" → "Wednesday, 14
June 2023 at 14:50:00 British Summer Time"

I agree that this carries some risk. On the "probably fine" part of the
ledger we have:

   - It aligns more with en-US where there is a comma for the "full"
   format, as well as some of the shorter ones
   - Firefox shipped it and didn't get any regression reports about this. I
   can't spot anything in my own search
   
<https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/buglist.cgi?query_format=specific&order=relevance+desc&bug_status=__all__&product=&content=en-gb+comma&comments=0>
   either.

https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40256057 is precisely the reason why
nobody has updated ICU for a long time and why it's important to have
enough checks in place to make such breakage much less likely.

Putting a change like this behind a flag is a bit fraught because we're
writing some new code to emulate what older versions of ICU did, and can't
be 100% confident that it's correct for all combinations. I will dig up the
CLDR change behind this and see if it's controllable by ICU inputs, as was
luckily the case for the Italian number formatting change.

Best regards,
Philip

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