Building Firefox

Where to begin...

Suppose I'll start off by saying that building Firefox wasn't an overly challenging experience. The majority of my problems building it for the first time came from the Mozilla Build failing to work properly on Windows Vista. To put things simply, after installing all of the required addons (mainly the required SDKs), the Mozilla Build start batch files could not find Visual Studio.

I decided to do some probing in my registry and found that the entries Mozilla Build was looking for simply weren't there. Ok that's no problem, I'll just add them in. I start up the start batch file again, everything startings working great, but then I get this error:

"Unexpected \Microsoft"

Around this time, I've been fighting with the Mozilla Build and Windows Vista for about 3 days trying to figure out exactly what was going wrong. I started to think to myself, "I bet it's Vista." I had the suspicion that Mozilla Build just wasn't working properly with Vista, so I decided to try it out on Windows XP.

So I look at all the extras I need to install for Mozilla Build to work once again. I look at one of the required packages, and it's listed by Microsoft as a Vista package. Well, I'm on Windows XP, so I probably won't need it. I run Mozilla Build's start batch file, and it fails. So I figure, I'll just install the package and see what happens. I download and install, run the Mozilla Build start batch file, everything runs perfectly.

After that point, unpacking and building Firefox with my own mozconfig was a breeze. I did run into one strange anomoly while attempting to run my build of Firefox. I received an exception saying something in a cpp file on line 811 (didn't document this error so I'm not sure of the exact message) was not handled. At the same time this happened, a window from McAfee anti-virus popped up asking me if I wanted to enable secure browsing. I clicked on the Ignore button in the error dialog and told McAfee no I don't want this feature. Each time I loaded my Firefox build the exact same thing would happen every time. Same error message would appear, McAfee would pop up.

Well I'm sure you'll never guess what happened when I disabled McAfee. The error message went away. Ok so apparently running my build of Firefox doesn't like it when McAfee interferes during start up. That's fine, I don't need McAfee running anyways when I start up my build of Firefox.

So after many days of frustration struggling with Vista, I caved in and did my build on XP. After a little bit of poking with my build, all runs well. I might attempt to build on Vista at a later point, but right now I just can't be bothered. It's more frustration than what it's worth at this point in time. I'll probably tackle Vista again in another week.