Firefox/WindowsDevEnvTips

Intro

• Developing & building Gecko& friends on Windows, especially Windows 8, has lots of room for improvement. Here's some of the tribal knowledge to make you happier on our most popular platform.

Prerequisite reading

• MDN Article "Windows Prerequisites"
• MDN Article on mach
• MDN Article "Build Instructions"

Mercurial

• Mercurial on Windows

Customizations to the Console Emulator

Build System Tweaks

• Install mozmake
• Use "mach build binaries" for fast incremental builds if you change only C/C++ files (requires mozmake)
• If you build without using mach (by running make/mozmake/pymake directly), be aware that you must run "mach build-backend" if you change a moz.build file.
• Disable Windows' malware scanning and indexing on your source and object dirs to reduce background CPU load while building.

Handy MOZCONFIG settings

Nifty Visual Studio tricks

VS 2010-13

VS 2010

VS 2011

VS 2012

Debugging JS on Windows

• Debug/inspect Metro Firefox remotely using devtools in desktop Firefox

Debugging CPP on Windows

• MDN Article "Debugging Mozilla on Windows"

IRC

• For build system questions/discussion: #build
• For Windows specific questions/discussion: #windev