Building Firefox

As a challenge I decided to build Firefox from source. The first thing I noticed is that unlike other Open Source software programs Firefox is not built using the standard configure, make, make install methods. They have a slightly different build script which I will explain in a moment.

My build process was completed on Ubuntu Dapper Drake, Pentium 4 2Ghz and 512MB RAM.

Here is the list of needed packages that you can download from Synaptic/apt-get in Ubuntu.

• build-essential
• libIDL-dev0.8
• cvs
• g++4.0
• gcc4.0
• make8.0
• libgtk2.0-dev

Now that you have all the tools you need for building you need to check out the Mozilla source tree.

1. This code will checkout client.mk into ./mozilla from the Bon Echo branch. Go to that directory and the last command will checkout the browser project. This step may take a while depending on your internet speed.

$ cvs -d :pserver:anonymous:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot co -r
MOZILLA_1_8_BRANCH mozilla/client.mk
$ cd mozilla
$ make -f client.mk checkout MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser

2. Before you can build you need to have a .mozconfig file in your ./mozilla directory. I have created this one which builds firefox with shared libraries, no optimization and I also enabled debugging. I also used gtk2 because I have version 0.8 of libIDL. By default the build will use gtk1. Create a new file called .mozconfig and copy the contents below. For a full list of acceptable flags you can see it here.

. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/ff-static
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser
ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
ac_add_options --disable-static
ac_add_options --enable-shared
ac_add_options --disable-tests
ac_add_options --disable-optimize
ac_add_options --enable-debug
ac_add_options --enable-default-toolkit=gtk2
ac_add_options --disable-installer

3. Finally I fired the build command to compile firefox.

make -f client.mk build

Finally the build was complete