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I'd like to learn how FireFox works behind the scenes. I'd like to understand the source code and the different components but the code-base is rather large and I'm not sure where to start.
I'm wondering if there is some sort of walk though written up by anybody either from the firefox team or from outside the community.
I've looked a little bit at: https://developer.mozilla.org/En but I don't see anything that screams "Start here". I'm simply trying to review their code base for [self-]educational reasons.
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Firefox is one of the world's most successful open source software projects. This means we make the code that runs Firefox available for anyone to modify and use so long as it adheres to our licence policy. Developers and anyone else who understands code can play with Firefox code, for free.
C++ and JavaScript As it is widely used in Mozilla, it makes sense to explain how JavaScript and C++ relate to each other in the Mozilla source code. C++ is a compiled language, while JavaScript is an interpreted language. JavaScript is most commonly known as a technology used to implement web sites.
You can look at the source directly with your web browser using Searchfox (start at https://searchfox.org/mozilla-central/source for the complete firefox source code of branch HEAD).
Mozilla Firefox is free and open source software, built by a community of thousands from all over the world.
Seneca College in Toronto has a program geared towards exactly this -- beginners to Mozilla development.
Check out some of these links:
Real World Mozilla
Fall 2008 Weekly Schedule
Some labs if you want to dive right in:
Lab: Learning Collaborative Development (Fall 2008)
Lab: Building Open Source Projects (Fall 2008)
Lab: Real World Mozilla - Source Code Reading
Lab: Working with Patches
Lab: Dive into Mozilla - Debugging Mozilla
Lab: Thunderbird Bug Fix
Lab: Modifying the Browser
Lab: Modifying Firefox using an extension
Lab: Real World Mozilla - First XPCOM Component
Lab: Real World Mozilla - Adding chrome to first XPCOM component
If you need any help, use IRC: #seneca on irc.mozilla.org. Don't worry if you're not a (Seneca) student, lots of people around the world (people from Seneca, people from Mozilla, and others) are in this channel, the purpose is to educate developers about open source in general and the Mozilla project specifically.
Good luck!
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