4th week into the open source development course and were discussing about how to build Firefox on your machine, which sounds fascinating and crazy at first no?
Requirements
I decided to build Firefox3.6 on my windows 7 Laptop and I basically followed the instructions in “Build documentation” on Mozilla’s Developers web site. Prior to building Firefox, I checked to see if I had the met the prerequisites and had all the tools that Firefox was dependent on in order to have a successful build. I was missing Windows SDK and Mozilla Build Tools, so I had to install both packages.
Tools Required
- Microsoft Visual C++ Tools
- Microsoft Windows SDK(s)
- Mozilla Build Tools
Get Source Code and Configure Build Options
Next step was to get the source code of Firefox, so I retrieved it using Mercurial. My build configuration option file “.mozconfig“ was set up with the following options:
ac_add_options —enable-application=browser
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser
Start Building…
I launched the command line prompt tool by running “C:<Mozilla-build¸start-msvc9.bat“ and went to the source directory where I had the Firefox code downloaded….wait that did not work , the folder name “Mozilla Builds” is right? Ops I had a space and as Mozilla stated that you can’t have any spaces in the directory path, so I renamed the folder to “MozillaBuilds” and it worked…Then I ran “$ make –f client.mk build” and………..after a long coffee break and a bit of waiting…The build was completed, and it took roughly 50 minutes.
I went into obj-i686-pc-mingw32/dist/bin and ran “firefox.exe” and it worked! So I guess I successfully compiled Firefox on my laptop
It was my first ever Firefox build and it all went smooth:)
