Building All the Major Open-Source Web Browsers

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."

Comments

I run Gentoo

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

So it's simply emerge --update world* but I always groan when I see Chromium has a new version, which it does almost weekly, because it takes approximately FOREVER to compile. Firefox and Seamonkey take a long time, sure, but Chromium, yikes, come back tomorrow.

*Actually, it's: emerge -v --deep --newuse --with-bdeps=y --update world 2>&1 | tee update-world-deeper-`date +%F`.log, but that's just me.

Re:Build

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Unfortunately, like too many OSS projects, Mozilla seems to think it will have the only cygwin instance on my system. It therefore assumes it's OK for me to just reconfigure the entire universe according to its preferences, redefine all my paths so the MozillaBuild version of everything takes precedence over anything else that's already installed, and so on.

In reality, I have various other tools installed that bridge the Windows and Linux worlds, including things fundamental to using various version control systems and other everyday needs. As much as I'd like to support Mozilla and be willing to contribute a bit here and there, I'm not going to compromise the development machine I also use to earn my pay cheque just to get their esoteric build system to work.

Re: Build

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Maybe, but unless you condone software piracy, that would require either buying a second Windows licence (unless you have one of the SA schemes that covers using Windows as both host and guest OS) or running something like Linux as your guest OS and figuring out the cross-compilation issues (if that's possible).

With today's software and licensing landscape, I just don't think setting up a custom VM for every project you work on is viable, nor that imposing burdens on that kind of level is the way to encourage skilled but casual/irregular contributors to help your project.