Popular:
 Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

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!

Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring
Request Metrics real user monitoring

Recent Features

  • By
    5 Ways that CSS and JavaScript Interact That You May Not Know About

    CSS and JavaScript:  the lines seemingly get blurred by each browser release.  They have always done a very different job but in the end they are both front-end technologies so they need do need to work closely.  We have our .js files and our .css, but...

  • By
    Facebook Open Graph META Tags

    It's no secret that Facebook has become a major traffic driver for all types of websites.  Nowadays even large corporations steer consumers toward their Facebook pages instead of the corporate websites directly.  And of course there are Facebook "Like" and "Recommend" widgets on every website.  One...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    MooTools Gone Wild: Element Flashing

    If you're like me and lay awake in bed at night, you've flipped on the TV and seen the commercials: misguided, attention-starved college girls fueled by alcohol ruining their futures by flashing lame camera-men on Spring Break. Why do they do it? Attention...

  • By
    MooTools-Like Element Creation in jQuery

    I really dislike jQuery's element creation syntax. It's basically the same as typing out HTML but within a JavaScript string...ugly! Luckily Basil Goldman has created a jQuery plugin that allows you to create elements using MooTools-like syntax. Standard jQuery Element Creation Looks exactly like writing out...

Discussion

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