04/08/2019: Firefox has been built
After hours of build attempts of both Chromium and Firefox, we have successfully packaged Firefox. Chromium is a story for another time. The build systems for these two browsers border on insanity and their overall size and complexity is paramount.
- Firefox requires both GTK2 and GTK3. GTK2 is required only for flash. [1]
- Both Chromium and Firefox require
nodejs
to build. - Both Chromium and Firefox require Python 2.
- Both browsers bundle all of their required third-party libraries and they cannot all be set to use the system's.
clang
is now the default and "supported" compiler of both browsers.- Firefox requires a version of
automake
which is 18(?) years old. [2] [3] - Firefox requires
rust
which was painful to package formusl
to say the least. - Chromium's build scripts require
python2
yet callpython
which points topython3
. - A large number of patches were needed for both to support
musl
. - Both browsers depend on GTK+3 which depends on
dbus
. This dependency was removed by using a fakeatk
library. - ALSA audio support is being removed from Firefox. This includes the configure flag to enable it.
- This will be updated as I remember things.
Sources: