How to get involved in development of Mozilla Firefox?

Question

I am a CS grad student, and I am interested in spending some spare time in getting involved with development of Mozilla Firefox web browser . I would like to contribute to HTML renderer , JavaScript engine etc. But I don't have any solid experience in writing parsers or similar stuff, and I don't have any clue from where to start.

There are of course some links in https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Developer_Guide/ but since Firefox is already is very huge project, I don't know from where I should start learning.

So, my question is what core things I need to learn first to get started with Web browser Development and from where I can learn this (any links)? Do I have to revise how to write parsers/compilers? How do I learn to write HTML renderer/ JavaScript engine? Is it even possible considering they are already very huge projects? Sometime back, I downloaded source code of V8 JavaScript engine (http://code.google.com/p/v8/) but I couldn't understand much from it's source code as it was highly optimized code, and there were no much useful comments for beginner like me to understand what going on.

Update: I am fairly comfortable working with C, C++, Java, PHP, C#, VB.Net, JavaScript and I am more interested in learning how web browser parses an web page, how it constructs and maintains the DOM, how CSS is applied, how HTML reflow engine works, how it interacts with JavaScript engine, how it interacts with web server, how the components are drawn on the screen etc.

Answer 1

Read the docs on getting started. Hang out on irc.mozilla.org in #developers and watch for interesting conversations. Introduce yourself in #introduction and ask questions. Go to http://bugzilla.mozilla.org and start searching for open bugs in components that sound interesting, then look for bugs that catch your fancy. Use tools like http://mxr.mozilla.org/ and http://dxr.mozilla.org to help you locate the relevant code, and ask questions in #developers. Learn, hack, repeat.

I wrote a post about my experiences getting involved over the past year, and it seems to reflect the path that a significant amount of Mozilla developers took.

Answer 2

You might want to review a list of known bugs and see if you're able to fix them. Other possible way to get a foot in the door is to get involved in quality assurance tasks, which would help you learn better internals of the application.