Firefox first runs

HiFive Unmatched
1

Hello everyone!

I want to share with you that after a month of research and building of all dependencies, I finally made Firefox run on the board. It is a lot until it is fully complete, however it already can do cool stuff.

I built the main branch of Firefox with rust and cargo 1.55-dev and nodejs 14.8.

I also had help from Mozilla community so thanks to them I was able to complete this.

I’ll try to package it in the next days (and see if I can build it with more optimizations) and I pretend to share with you here.

A demo of it running can be seen here:

Cheers and stay safe :slight_smile:

6 Likes
2

I get a “request access” message from google when I try to look at the demo URL. Maybe you need to make a sharable link first and post that?

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Sorry, I made a mistake copying the link. I’ve updated it.

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Thanks. Works for me now.

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wow, super cool
and nice to finally see youtube working in-browser

i wonder how to improve performance?
is it mostly javascript related?

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Great work.

I’ll like to try to build it and get it up and running on 21.10 Beta this weekend.
Can you share the details of things you had to do, or link to some forum posts, etc…?

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Yes, it is Javascript.

In order to complete the port, I requested help from Mozilla community and they mentioned that performance might be improved significantly using the JIT module for Javascript and there is a group working on this already, so it will be improved “soon”.

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I’m working now in order to integrate the changes to main branch of mozila-unified code, so you shouldn’t require to modify it but build the dependencies (takes in between 1 to 2 days of building…)

I’ll try to prepare a blog for explain the process. :slight_smile:

2 Likes
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Great. I look forward to reading it,

I have Qemu 6.1 set up on my Ryzen 3950X machine, with a Ubuntu 21.04 RISC-V guest,
The CPU performance of an emulated 64- bit RISC-V core is over 2x that of the Unmatched’s U740 (in Geekbench), and it supports 8 cores, so that will have a significant (positive) impact on build time…

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thats great to hear

if they need help with things, testing, bugs etc, please let us know, maybe people can help out with the port!

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for that qemu setup are you able to get a fully working gui (with graphics acceleration?) working as well?

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I prepared this article. I hope it helps you

2 Likes
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I think that I’m going to take this approach from now. It is lot faster.

Nonetheless, I wanted to build it full native as a whim :sweat_smile:

1 Like
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@ZXnord This is great news and congratulations! is there a package available anywhere?

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Sorry the delay. I’m attaching the package now.

In addition to this, I’m trying to push my changes to main branch of mozilla, so it will be possible to build from source also.

You should only add /opt/zxnord/bin to your PATH and execute firefox.

This build was created using ./mach build command, so I don’t believe that is built optimized. After pushing code to mozilla’s main branch I will build it again optimized in order to improve a little bit the performance. However, I think that without the javascript JIT module performance cannot increase a lot.

Please let me know if it doesn’t work in order to update the package. I tested it, however it could have issues. :sweat_smile:

3 Likes