Is installing from AUR similar to install from source?

Question

I wonder if installing applications from AUR is similar to installing from source? Recently I have a problem where Eclipse SWT embeded browser is broken and 1 solution is installing firefox from source. So I wonder if installing from AUR is similar as installing from source?
StackOverflow question about broken SWT Browser

Answer 1

You may also be interested in ABS.  ABS is the official build system for Arch.  Things supported by Developers go into Core and Extra, things supported by trusted users go into community.  To get the packages for the extra (which is where firefox lives), install and run (as root) abs.  Then the build stuff for firefox will live at /var/abs/extra/firefox
ewaller@odin:/var/abs/extra/firefox 1021 %ls
firefox.desktop firefox.install firefox-install-dir.patch libvpx.patch mozconfig PKGBUILD vendor.js
Looking at the PKGBUILD, that package does compile from source.  Copy the directory to a user directory, enter that directory, and you can build your own copy with makepkg.  You can then install the package with pacman -U
If you need to change something, change the files in your local copy.
This is not that tough, but it is most definitively not a project for a beginner.  The documentation you need is out there, you will need to do your research.