happy-ferret / cowl

COWL implementation for Firefox

This is the latest implementation of COWL for the Firefox web browser. We've taken on the challenge of proving the COWL source as a clean set of patches for bleeding-edge Firefox. Hence, at the time of this writing all the features describe in the paper are not yet available. We will keep working to make these available as soon as possible. However, if you are interested in a slightly older version of COWL, with a slightly less clean patch, please contact us -- we would be happy to provide.

Build COWL

To build COWL you need a .mozconfig file. Here is an example of the debug build with the clang compiler:

export CC="clang -fcolor-diagnostics -DCOWL_DEBUG"
export CXX="clang++ -fcolor-diagnostics -DCOWL_DEBUG"
ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
ac_add_options --enable-debug
ac_add_options --disable-optimize 
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/obj-debug
ac_add_options --with-ccache=/usr/bin/ccache
export COWL_DEBUG=1

If you just want an optimized non-debug version, here is an example with GCC (latest clang on Arch Linux does not compile as of this writing):

ac_add_options --enable-application=browser
mk_add_options MOZ_OBJDIR=@TOPSRCDIR@/obj
ac_add_options --with-ccache=/usr/bin/ccache

Once you have the .mozconfig file simply run mach build.

Running COWL

To run the customized Firefox browser simply execute mach run. Checkout the examples at http://cowl.ws to start playing around.

Troubleshooting

LWorkers missing?

The next set of patches will include our LWorkers. For now you can play with an LWorker-like API built on top of iframes provided at http://cowl.ws/cowl.js.