How to make Firefox builds 17% faster

mbitsnbites 159 points 28 comments April 13, 2026
blog.farre.se · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (6 comments)

Devorlon

Why compile code when ccache faster

K0IN

wow, 17% is impressive with such an easy fix. i wonder if we could just build this as a separate project and pull the webidl files as a dependency.

shevy-java

So ... perhaps Mozilla should focus on user share dropping. I understand that speed is relevant, but focusing on that strategy does not really work when dinosaur-like extinction is around the corner.

mmastrac

Can you (err... buildcache) cache Rust proc-macros? I've been battling this with sccache and I'm now maintaining a 10-patch deep stack for the next.js build CI. Windows builds were ridiculously poor on cache hits rates too because of non-determinism that was not able to figure out. I'd be happy to test it out.

allenrb

I guess “purge 17% of the code” is not the correct answer?

evmar

I’m not too familiar with Firefox builds. Why are clobber builds common? At first glance it seems weird to add a cache around your build system vs fixing your build system.

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