Writing and Running Automated Firefox Browser Chrome Tests

As a followup to making my first patch for Firefox, it came time to write some automated tests for it. Turns out Mozilla has an entire suite of automated testing tools for their platforms. All thoroughly documented, they range from the ultra low-level compiled code tests to “record and play” macro testing for human UI [...]

Modding Firefox

As the semester is drawing to a close and we the open source crew are feeling comfortable with the JavaScript language, Dave took us to the next level. From the content scripts we had been working on, we got our first exposure to chrome scripts: JavaScript that doesn’t just run in the browser: it runs [...]

Building Mozilla Firefox on Windows 7

I’d always thought it would be scary building a large application like Mozilla Firefox completely from source, but a few weeks ago I did some initial looking into it. With a recent nudge from a professor, I went ahead and successfully retrieved the source and compiled Firefox. Here’s how I did it. Step 0: I [...]

My First Bug

After identifying and analyzing various performance issues I noted related to hardware acceleration in Firefox 4 nightlies, it was now time to make my findings public. Bugzilla would be the end result, but there were quite a few steps in between. First, there was consultation. I’d never filed a bug before and as punctual as [...]

Getting ready to file my first bug using xperf

If you’ll remember from my last blog entry, I’ve been stress-testing Minefield using Chromeexperiments in an attempt to identify bugs and bottlenecks. Without being able to identify any crashes or unusual non-performance related behaviour, I then had the task of investigating profiling tools to find the issue. And then things got messy. I thought things [...]

Performance testing Minefield and Chrome using Chrome Experiments

Now that I have my Firefox testing environment, it’s time for my first task: Performance Testing! For this, I needed to know what to test (in this case, nightly builds of Minefield and Chromium), how to test (the Chrome Experiments) and what to determine (speed, smoothness, and responsiveness). There are quite a few experiments, but [...]

Setting up a Firefox testing environment

In light of jumping into open source development, I first decided to explore Firefox and to try and learn a bit about it, its architecture and how to accommodate a testing environment for it. First thing was first: downloading a prerelease version of Firefox. I had two choices: download the current (but less stable) nightly [...]