Building Firefox/SURF

This page is to serve as a guide for interested researchers (primarily academic researchers) who would like to experiment with Firefox for research purposes. Such experiments might include:

- Developing new compiler features, performance improvements, or security mechanisms
- Altering the behavior of the browser with respect to the web platform
- Creating a web scanning platform based on the browser (similar to OpenWPM)

Or something entirely different. Be creative.

Building Firefox Locally

The first step will almost certainly be to build the browser locally. Firefox has a well maintained mechanism for obtaining the dependencies needed to build it, even on Windows. Follow the Developer guide at MDN to build Firefox for the first time locally.

Once you've built it, use ./mach run to start the browser and take it for a spin.

Running Tests (Locally)

./mach test path/to/test will run most types of tests; for example ./mach test dom/security/test/csp/test_upgrade_insecure.html

You can add --headless (after 'test') to run them without launching the browser window. This is useful when working on a remote server. Note however that while --headless works most of the time, if a test fails to run, it is worth re-running it without -headless in a GUI environment.

gtests are run differently, for example ./mach gtest "*ReducePrecision_*" to run tests with 'ReducePrecision_' in their name (which would be tests like these.