Make Firefox fly: building from a minefield of source

David M Williams
Monday, 30 June 2008 12:09

Opinion and Analysis

The icon is different, and even the Help/About menu identifies itself as Minefield 3.0, with Gecko version 2008063012. There is no Fedora-specific build information because this was not built by the Fedora Project but by myself, right now.

Note! If you get an error page this may be because the browser is trying to load up pages you previously had open in a Firefox session. You should open Firefox then close it and elect not to save the state. Then re-run your newly compiled build.

Minefield is nothing scary, even despite its frightening monicker. No, it is merely a "trunk build" of Firefox, that is, Firefox as it stands at this moment in time, and not as an official beta or pre-release or release version.

You can read about it at the Minefield Start Page which is accessible from any web browser; it doesn't have to be from within Minefield itself. You can read about it now, before you even begin downloading the source code itself.

Do keep in mind you can go back to Mozilla's FTP site and download the source code for any previous release. I opted for the very latest code which means there may be new features since the official version 3.0 release but there may also be bugs introduced. You can, instead, download the source code for the official release and still follow the instructions above. You will still receive the benefits of building on your own architecture.

After executing ps -lmp again on my running build I can see the SZ column is reporting a slightly lower amount of memory pages than the official version I received in my Fedora software update.

Now, my experiments have been fairly simple - but even so, I am reporting lower memory usage over the life of the running program. I am confident your experiments will also be similar.

If you wish to now run with your build of Firefox there's several options. The easiest is to allow Minefield to set itself as your default web browser. A tidier option is to build an installer for it, and you can find this under your ~/Downloads/mozilla/browser/installer directory. The installer will put the Firefox executable file and its plugins and libraries into the right system directories.

You need not fear missing out on future releases as Mozilla continue working on their code. You can re-build from source when major milestones are reached or at regular intervals using the latest trunk code.

Happy Firefoxing. And remember, the open source world is a minefield of riches.