My website, blog and portfolio…

So unlike previous versions of firefox its impossible to clear all the history. How The fuck do I remove browser history, cookies and everything else from firefox!?

Here’s a post with the same question on this issue straight from mozillas website..

http://support.mozilla.com/tiki-view_forum_thread.php?locale=ro&forumId=1&comments_parentId=399203

For those who are interested, I finally managed to clear the shit. I removed firefox, ran cclean and reinstalled firefox. Something is wrong with firefox.  Also I switched it so firefox is always in secure browsing mode. For those who are paranoid like me, just leave the stupid thing in secure browsing mode.

This is a multi-part article, see part 1

In the previous article I setup a working development environment on Windows. In this article I’ll setup my environment get a copy of Mozilla Firefox compiled and running from Mercurial. Mercurial is Mozilla’s CVS and comes with the (already installed) Mozilla Build package.

After testing that hg is working:

$ hg

Mercurial Distributed SCM

basic commands:

add        add the specified files on the next commit
annotate   show changeset information per file line
clone      make a copy of an existing repository
commit     commit the specified files or all outstanding changes
diff       diff repository (or selected files)
export     dump the header and diffs for one or more changesets
init       create a new repository in the given directory
log        show revision history of entire repository or files
merge      merge working directory with another revision
parents    show the parents of the working dir or revision
pull       pull changes from the specified source
push       push changes to the specified destination
remove     remove the specified files on the next commit
serve      export the repository via HTTP
status     show changed files in the working directory
update     update working directory

use “hg help” for the full list of commands or “hg -v” for details

I checked out Mozilla Firefox 3.5 into the c:/191src directory (as recommended by the wiki):

hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/releases/mozilla-1.9.1/ c:/191src

This step took quite sometime (as the wiki mentioned) so I stepped away, grabbed a drink and did a few things around the house before returning to the computer.

Next I created my .mozconfig file and placed it into c:/191src. This file tells configure and make what options should be used to build mozilla. The descriptions for each item in this file are rather long, so I’ll link to the page describing how to make it. Here’s the one that I build for my project:

# kg4cjv’s mozilla config version .1
ac_add_options –enable-application=browser
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser

This config does not contain any debug information, the  Configuring Build Options wiki article explains how to setup this file properly for building a debug browser.

After the config is made building is required. So I ran the following command:

make -f client.mk build

Make was trucking along doing its thing when it hit an error:

configure: error: System header atlbase.h is not available. See http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/atlbase.h for details on fixing this problem.
*** Fix above errors and then restart with “make -f client.mk build”
make[1]: *** [configure] Error 1
make[1]: Leaving directory `/c/191src’
make: *** [/c/191src/Makefile] Error 2

So of course I hit the website provided above and found out that this library is only included with the professional version of the Microsoft Visual C++, which I don’t have. ATL is only used for a small portion of the code and can be disabled, so I modified my config file to not include this portion of the code:

# kg4cjv’s mozilla config version .1
ac_add_options –enable-application=browser
mk_add_options MOZ_CO_PROJECT=browser
ac_add_options –disable-xpconnect-idispatch
ac_add_options –disable-activex
ac_add_options –disable-activex-scripting
ac_add_options –disable-accessibility

Make tucked along after this for quite sometime and finally after about an hour of waiting it’s time to make the installer:

make -C browser/installer installer

Now it’s ready to be installed and ran from  dist/install/sea/firefox-3.5b5pre.en-US.win32.installer.exe!!