Build Firefox Faster with Artifact Builds

By  on  

Working on Firefox DevTools has always been a dream of mine, mostly because it feels like the ultimate way to give back to the development community and those that helped me become a success.  And when I explain who Mozilla is and people ask "Oh, so you work on Firefox?!", I can finally say "yes"!

Of course working on Firefox DevTools isn't without its problems, the biggest being that Firefox takes forever to build.  And its effect on a MacBook Pro's CPU?  Well...here's a recent photo of me building Firefox:

Build Firefox

Thankfully there's a faster way to build Firefox for local developer:  artifact builds.  Artifact builds allow you to use pre-built binaries to build Firefox for debugging DevTools (and other features) much more quickly.

Start by creating a mozconfig with the following contents:

# Automatically download and use compiled C++ components:
ac_add_options --enable-artifact-builds

# Write build artifacts to:
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=./objdir-frontend

The trigger a build using mach:

./mach clobber && ./mach build

# Use `./mach build faster` in the future

Firefox builds go from an hour (and potentially a call to the Fire Department) to just a few minutes.  If you're looking to help develop DevTools, Firefox, or simply have your own custom build of Firefox, jump on artifact builds -- these mozconfig directives are worth the time!

Recent Features

  • By
    Create a CSS Flipping Animation

    CSS animations are a lot of fun; the beauty of them is that through many simple properties, you can create anything from an elegant fade in to a WTF-Pixar-would-be-proud effect. One CSS effect somewhere in between is the CSS flip effect, whereby there's...

  • By
    Send Text Messages with PHP

    Kids these days, I tell ya.  All they care about is the technology.  The video games.  The bottled water.  Oh, and the texting, always the texting.  Back in my day, all we had was...OK, I had all of these things too.  But I still don't get...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Printing MooTools Accordion Items

    Sometimes we're presented with unforeseen problems when it comes to our JavaScript effects. In this case, I'm talking about printing jQuery and MooTools accordions. Each "closed" accordion content element has its height set to 0 which means it will be hidden when the...

  • By
    Introducing MooTools Templated

    One major problem with creating UI components with the MooTools JavaScript framework is that there isn't a great way of allowing customization of template and ease of node creation. As of today, there are two ways of creating: new Element Madness The first way to create UI-driven...

Discussion

    Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!