Hardscrabble 🍫

By Max Jacobson

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building firefox for the first time

February 18, 2015

recently I came across two blog posts:

They kind of tell similar stories. Both Firefox and Chromium1 are open source and welcome contributions from the general public, but both of them are probably developed primarily by the companies behind them. These posts are sort of encouraging people to consider contributing back to the app they spend most of their computer time in and hoping to make it sound more doable and less terrifying.

I came away from the Chromium post with a lot of clear and friendly knowledge about how I might make a contribution but actually more convinced that I’m not qualified to do so, because I don’t know any of the languages she mentioned in the post and don’t currently plan to learn them. If I did, I’d know exactly where to start and how to proceed.

The firefox blog post was an offer to help mentor a select few through getting up and running and making a first few contributions. I thought about it for a few minutes while I read the blog post and filed it away in the back of my mind, but I was too slow, and the offer has now closed. I thought maybe I could do it because having a mentor helps a lot and, from the sounds of it, the front-end of Firefox is built using the tools of the web, which I already kind of know and work with. From the post:

We will use JavaScript, CSS, and XUL (similar to HTML).

Sure.

Also, Firefox is my day-to-day browser, so selfishly I like the idea of submitting something that would benefit me. I first got excited about the internet in Firefox. I’ve occasionally switched to Chrome and Safari but I always come back to Firefox. I don’t know. And I kind of think it’s having a moment? Well just someone wrote one blog post about it recently:

I like dhh’s perspective there; sometimes I feel like a browser hipster and like I’m the only web developer not using Chrome (I know I’m not) but I do think he’s right that it’s important that any one company doesn’t have too strong a hold on how the internet works.

So tonight I took the first step and built Firefox locally. It was surprisingly easy but also surprisingly time-consuming. If you want to do the same I recommend following the Simple Firefox build instructions but I’m going to share here anyway the steps I took.

wget -q https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/raw-file/default/python/mozboot/bin/bootstrap.py && python bootstrap.py
Your system should be ready to build Firefox for Desktop! If you have not already,
obtain a copy of the source code by running:

    hg clone https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central

Or, if you prefer Git:

    git clone https://git.mozilla.org/integration/gecko-dev.git
37:56.85 We know it took a while, but your build finally finished successfully!
To take your build for a test drive, run: |mach run|
For more information on what to do now, see https://developer.mozilla.org/docs/Developer_Guide/So_You_Just_Built_Firefox

I’m sorry this blog post became a bullet point list halfway through. That wasn’t really fair.

Probably in the morning I’ll forget I ever wanted to contribute to Firefox but hopefully not. I’m on the record now.

  1. Chromium is basically Chrome, but open source. 

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