User:Jamesboston

Profile

James Boston is working on the Mozilla Developer Resource Kit.

Blog & homepage:
jamesboston.ca

Contact:
JamesB on irc://irc.mozilla.org/seneca

Building Firefox

Building on Windows Vista

Install Visual Studio: (The express version will work.)

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/vstudio/aa700736.aspx

Get Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit Update for Windows Vista:

http://tinyurl.com/2t42ga

Download and install Mozilla Build, a package of software prereqs: (If you get a message saying this application did not install properly then you should see a windows dialog giving you the option to re-install with the 'correct settings'. After that all should be well.)

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/libraries/win32/MozillaBuildSetup-1.2.exe

Open a shell window by right clicking and using admin privileges: (The example here is for Visual Studio 2005. The name of the bat file you use should match the directory that Visual Studio is installed in.)

c:\mozilla-build\start-msvc8.bat

Get the makefile instructions to pull the source tree and put it in a directory called mozilla in your home directory: (This will create a mozilla directory in your root i.e C:\Users\YourName or whatever. If a directory called mozilla already exits, even if it's empty, it will cause an error.)

cd
cvs -d :pserver:anonymous@cvs-mirror.mozilla.org:/cvsroot co mozilla/client.mk

Checkout the source:

cd ~/mozilla
make -f client.mk checkout MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser

Create and open a hidden file called .mozconfig in your home directory:

notepad.exe ~/.mozconfig

Add the following lines to .mozconfig

# My first mozilla config
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/obj-@CONFIG_GUESS@
. $topsrcdir/browser/config/mozconfig
ac_add_options --disable-optimize
ac_add_options --enable-debug
ac_add_options --disable-static --enable-shared

Start the build (which will take AT LEAST one hour):

cd ~/mozilla
make -f client.mk build

Once the build is finished you should set the following environment variable to turn-off assertion dialogs:

export XPCOM_DEBUG_BREAK=warn

When you run Firefox for the first time, create and select a new profile called "development" (or any name of your choice) to avoid corrupting your current profile. You can do this while running your current version of Firefox using these command line options:

~/mozilla/obj*/dist/bin/firefox -Profilemanager -no-remote

The finished build can be found in the ~/mozilla/obj*/dist/bin directory.

Run the file "mozilla" or "firefox", not the binary "mozilla-bin" or "firefox-bin".

For more detailed info about the windows build requirements visit Mozilla Developer Center.

For more detailed information about Mozilla building visit Real World Mozilla Build Lab.