FireFox – Getting Started
This site was established with the my express desired to learn how certain major open source software packages work; this was to be a personal endeavor to broaden my horizons.
As it turns out, I ended up enrolling in graduate school. I’m pursuing a Master of Science in Software Engineering — something I’ve been planing since my B.S. (which is as represented).
I lost my focus on this site but I don’t want to. I want to regain that focus and this is my first post to that end.
This post is the information I gather while setting up to review and understand how Mozilla’s FireFox works.
Getting Started with Firefox
A while back, before I had even started writing this post, I posted a question on StackoverFlow.com about how to learn about how FireFox works. I’ve received some great answers.
The answer I chose to accept was from jbinto; who gave a wonderful detailed answer and list of resources to pursue this. I’ll be utilizing these resources along with my own method of stumbling though the code.
I’ve started with the Windows Build Prerequisites page since I’ll be building on windows (vista). I imagine my greatest audience will be Windows users and hence I’ll stick with windows. But I do use Linux and Mac OS X too, so if you have a question about these environments, post a comment and I’ll try to address it.
I’ve downloaded and installed the package. It apparently includes everything you need to build FireFox — Including the Source Control Tool and diffing utilities and such.
I want to work on the latest tip; but apparently, the FireFox team uses Mercurial as their source control tool. I’ve never used this tool so this is good and bad. I can learn to tool but I have to spend the scarce resource of time to do so. I’ll be taking a short deviation way from my current plan to learn the Mercurial basics.
I won’t be posting much on how to use Mercurial as there is plenty of documentation. Anyway, off to learn about Mercurial — I shall continue with this article series once I’ve obtained the tip of FireFox.
