The Dark Tunnel..........

So it's been a while since I last posted, been wandering in a real dark "tunnel" trying to build the environment for Firefox. I first took a look at the MDC wiki on building FireFox for a Windows platform. From first sight it was, to put it mildly, tedious. In order to get my platform ready to build this environment I had to go and download a few a things:

- Microsoft SDK for Windows 7
- VisualStudio 2005/2008 (I chose 2008)
- The current mozilla-build file

Downloading three files might not seem to be much but when two of three files are more than two gigabytes then you can understand my frustration. Three hours later everything was prepped and installed, building the environment would be a cinch, or so I thought. After following the MDC wiki I ended up in a shell that was created to simulate a linux environment (start-msvc9.bat). In order to build Firefox on my system I needed to retrieve a clone from the mercurial that would produce a localized copy of the mozilla-central repository on my system. After issuing the command: "make -f client.mk build" the system beginning running tests to ensure that I had the necessary components installed and configured.

Enter my first headache, for a strange reason the test failed to identify the C compiler on my machine, after an hour of trying to figure it out I decided to google up error to find out if others had experienced the same problem as I had. After doing a bit of research I found out that the problem could be resolved by editing the PATH environment variable in the system properties.

After solving this I figured it would be smooth sailing but that was not the case. Enter headache #2, this little error that I picked up when attempting to build on my fourth try:

Adding configure options from /c/mozilla-central/mozconfig:
--enable-application=browser
--disable-optimize
--enable-debug
--enable-tests
configure: error: System header atlbase.h is not available. See http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/atlbase.h for details on fixing this problem.
make[1]: *** [configure] Error 1
make: *** [/c/mozilla-central/ff-dbg/Makefile] Error 2

After carefully reading this error message I knew that my system lacked the atlbase.h header file which is necessary in order for the building to be completed. I followed the link which directed me to another link that ultimately landed me on this page. Seeing as my system is a 64 bit OS the only version of the header file that would work was the PSDK-amd64.exe. After installing the missing files I attempted to build again and my result was as follows:


Then I navigated into my obj-dir folder nicknamed ff-dbg and searched for the mozilla or firefox executable:



Issuing the command to start it with the profile manager and the build FireFox Browser (which looks identical to the one I normally use):