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Building All the Major Open-Source Web Browsers

Posted by Soulskill on from the who-needs-packages dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Cristophe de Dinechin, long-time software developer, has an interesting article on the processes involved in building the major browsers. From the article:

"Mozilla Firefox, Chromium (the open-source variant of Chrome) and WebKit (the basis for Safari) are all great examples of open-source software. The Qt project has a simple webkit-based web browser in their examples. So that's at least four different open-source web browsers to choose from. But what does it take to actually build them? The TL;DR answer is that these are complex pieces of software, each of them with rather idiosyncratic build systems, and that you should consider 100GB of disk space to build all the browsers, a few hours of download, and be prepared to learn lots of new, rather specific tools."

5 of 106 comments (clear)

  1. Easy with Gentoo by crow · · Score: 5, Informative

    Of course, if you use a source-based distribution, it's easy, but that's not the point. If you download the source and build it yourself, you'll have to learn a bit about how they manage the build environment. You'll have to handle being sure all the dependencies are installed. You'll have to figure out any configuration options.

    That's exactly what people who make distributions do. If you want to see how complicated the build is for any piece of software, just look at how complicated the build scripts are for various distributions. I expect you can find these for the binary distributions. With Gentoo, just look at the ebuild file.

  2. Re:So the STL:DR version... by Lunix+Nutcase · · Score: 2, Informative

    Are you a frequent contributor? No? Okay, well shut the fuck up and let Bennett weigh in on this.

  3. People who do this by SampleFish · · Score: 4, Informative

    There are some really great distros that are based on said sources:

    Pale Moon is an open source alternative to FireFox:
    http://www.palemoon.org/

    SRWare Iron is a Chromium project:
    http://www.srware.net/en/softw...

    1. Re:People who do this by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      SRWare Iron is not a Chromium project - it's a closed-source fork of the open-source Chromium codebase. I find it interesting that there are people who are concerned enough about privacy to switch away from Chrome/Chromium, but are still happy to use a closed-source browser which has had unknown modifications done to it.

      http://www.insanitybit.com/201...

  4. Re:I run Gentoo by morgauxo · · Score: 5, Informative

    I use Gentoo too. Most things compile in minutes. Some things such as browsers can take hours. Big Desktop environments like KDE/Gnome and also LibreOffice can take over a day each. Some people can't imagine how a Gentoo user can stand it. It's really not a problem though.

    The build process never prompts you for anything, all options are chosen before it starts. It also does not require a GUI. (There are GUIs available if you want one) It's just pretty simple commands like (emerge chromium). Emerge handles the whole process, downloading source, compiling, installing and does all the dependencies too.

    So... the answer to long build times is easy. Just start the build in a screen session. Then you can close the window and forget about it. It will be done when it is done, feel free to continue using your computer in the mean time. Or, not. You CAN walk away. If you are concerned about the build process running in the background slowing down your computer when you are using it for other things that's no problem either. You can just raise the nice level. It might take longer to finish but you never even have to know that the build is running.