Mozilla Development Tools

This page lists the various development tools that we operate and/or maintain here at mozilla.org. Naturally, source code for all of these tools is also available. The tools needed to build Mozilla are described on the build page for your platform.

Mozilla Source Code (Mercurial and CVS)

"Trunk" development for Gecko 1.9.1/Firefox 3.5 and beyond uses the Mercurial source code version control system. Earlier releases and other products use the CVS version control system. If you are doing active development, checking out source code from one of these is preferable to downloading an archived snapshot, as you get up-to-the-minute changes.

MXR

You can browse the up-to-the-minute latest version of the source code online through a massively-hyperlinked source code browser (based on LXR) that lets you cross-reference function and variable names.

Bonsai

Bonsai is tree control (get it?). It is our home-grown web-based tool for watching the up-to-the-minute goings-on in our CVS repository (viewing checkins and log messages, reading diffs, etc.)

Tinderbox

Tinderbox is for knowing when the tree is in flames. It is our home-grown web-based tool for watching the progress of the continuous builds that we run on multiple platforms. It is how we are able to tell when a checkin has broken the build on some platform, and how we know which person needs to be viciously flogged.

Bugzilla

Bugzilla is where developers can report bugs in the Mozilla source releases, and browse an online database of already-reported bugs.

Doctor

Doctor is a web interface to CVS. It lets developers and others edit pages on the mozilla.org web site without having to use CVS. Doctor lets you edit pages in WYSIWYG mode if the pages contain the <?doctor enable_wysiwyg_mode ?> processing instruction. Access Doctor by clicking the "Edit this Page" link at the bottom of any mozilla.org web page.