Build Firefox Faster with Artifact Builds

Working on Firefox DevTools has always been a dream of mine, mostly because it feels like the ultimate way to give back to the development community and those that helped me become a success. And when I explain who Mozilla is and people ask "Oh, so you work on Firefox?!", I can finally say "yes"!

Of course working on Firefox DevTools isn't without its problems, the biggest being that Firefox takes forever to build. And its effect on a MacBook Pro's CPU? Well...here's a recent photo of me building Firefox:

Thankfully there's a faster way to build Firefox for local developer: artifact builds. Artifact builds allow you to use pre-built binaries to build Firefox for debugging DevTools (and other features) much more quickly.

Start by creating a mozconfig with the following contents:

# Automatically download and use compiled C++ components: ac_add_options --enable-artifact-builds # Write build artifacts to: mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=./objdir-frontend

The trigger a build using mach :

./mach clobber && ./mach build # Use `./mach build faster` in the future