This is my first experience in building such a big application. It took me a lot of time to do the research, I went to Google, went to ChatZilla, and went to blog, tried to get help. The following are my steps to build FireFox.

== Steps to build Mozilla Firefox ==

Here are the steps that I took to build Firefox under Windows with Visual Studio 2005.

Step 1: Install Visual Studio .NET Professional 2005 by default.

Step 2: Install

[http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Windows_Build_Prerequisites#GNU_Tools_for_Microsoft_Windows_.28Cygwin.29 GNU Tools for Microsoft Windows (Cygwin)]

. Cywin is a Linux-like environment for Windows. It includes many utilities that are used to build firefox, such as gawk, perl, zip, and make. When selecting packages, you must make sure the version of make is 3.80.

Step 3: Download and Extract the [http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/mozilla/libraries/win32/moztools-static.zip static moztools libraries] for Visual C++ to directory “c:\proj\moztools”.

Step 4: Create a build script called C:\proj\buildenv.bat to setup the appropriate environment variables and paths.

ac_add_options --disable-installer

</pre>

Step 6: Login to the mozilla CVS repository, using the password anonymous.

C:\proj> buildenv.bat

C:\proj> cvs login

Step 7: Checkout the build script.

C:\proj> cd mozilla

C:\proj\mozilla> make -f client.mk checkout

Step 9: Build the Firefox from source:

I enabled the virtual memory on Windows and reboot the system, after another 15 minutes compiling, the new Firefox is built.

* [http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Windows_Build_Prerequisites#GNU_Tools_for_Microsoft_Windows_.28Cygwin.29 GNU Tools for Microsoft Windows (Cygwin)]

* [http://gemal.dk/mozilla/build.html Building Firefox on Win32 using Visual Studio .NET 2005]

* [http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?t=338845 How to build Firefox with Visual Studio 2005 Express Edition]