How to get Firefox 52.x working on PPC

[schwarzygesetzlos]

Firefox has been giving me a hard time to get it working for some versions... I did much builds and fiddling around with USE-flags until I found a known good solution (for the time being). Since Firefox 52.x is an ESR and will be around for some time I decided to share my experiences.

Following flags got FF going:

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# emerge -pqv firefox
[ebuild   R   ] www-client/firefox-52.2.0  USE="custom-optimization dbus gmp-autoupdate jemalloc pulseaudio startup-notification system-icu -bindist -custom-cflags -debug -gtk2 -hardened -hwaccel -jack (-neon) (-pgo) (-rust) (-selinux) (-system-cairo) -system-harfbuzz -system-jpeg -system-libevent -system-libvpx -system-sqlite {-test} -wifi" L10N="de -ach -af -an -ar -as -ast -az -bg -bn-BD -bn-IN -br -bs -ca -cak -cs -cy -da -dsb -el -en-GB -en-ZA -eo -es-AR -es-CL -es-ES -es-MX -et -eu -fa -ff -fi -fr -fy -ga -gd -gl -gn -gu -he -hi -hr -hsb -hu -hy -id -is -it -ja -ka -kab -kk -km -kn -ko -lij -lt -lv -mai -mk -ml -mr -ms -nb -nl -nn -or -pa -pl -pt-BR -pt-PT -rm -ro -ru -si -sk -sl -son -sq -sr -sv -ta -te -th -tr -uk -uz -vi -xh -zh-CN -zh-TW"

Where in my case I needed USE="+custom-optimization +jemalloc +system-icu" additionally, the rest was default.

Yes, custom-optimization!

FF got built with the default CFLAGS, but at least on my machine this leads to a binary which just crashes at startup (or hogs the CPU for 100% if you already got a .mozilla/ config directory). So I used the following CFLAGS for Firefox:

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CFLAGS="-pipe -O1 -mcpu=G5 -mtune=G5"
CXXFLAGS="${CFLAGS}"

Which finally resulted in a working build!