NDKr5 in production

Firefox 8 for Android is now being built with NDKr5. Bug 657723 tracked deploying the updated NDK to our build slaves and updating the configuration to use it. After a couple of hiccups along the way we started producing on change builds with it on Wed July 27th and the first NDKr5 built nightly went out the following Thursday. We will build Firefox 6 and Firefox 7 with NDKr4 as we want to get a full development cycle’s worth of testing with the new toolchain.

This is important for a couple reasons. First, it gave us some nice performance improvements. I’d love to show you some nice graphs that illustrate that, but our data is so noisy that it depresses me. Anecdotally, several Mozillians have come on the #mobile irc channel in the last few days to comment on the improved snappiness they’d noticed over the weekend.

But, the biggest thing for me is that you can now build Firefox for Android using a stock NDK. Previously you had to use our custom built NDK (which was built on the crystax NDK) to support the usage of STL in Mozilla. This should make it much easier for your casual Android developer to drop in and contribute to Firefox on Android.

To get started building Firefox for Android with NDKr5, check out the build instructions here. Or if you want to get started a little more quickly, you can grab the development VM I posted about.