Firefox 137 Beta Now Available With VA-API Accelerated H.265/HEVC On Linux

With Firefox 136 released, Mozilla has promoted Firefox 137 to its beta phase.

Most exciting for Linux users with today’s Firefox 137 Beta release is the previously reported news of HEVC/H.265 video playback within Firefox using VA-API. HEVC VA-API support is enabled for Firefox 137 Linux builds to provide a better GPU-accelerated video playback experience on the Linux desktop with the Video Acceleration API being supported across multiple drivers / GPU vendors.

Firefox 137 Beta

HEVC VA-API playback on Linux is the most notable Firefox 137.0 beta change but there is also other changes like Firefox now identifying all links within PDFs and turning them into hyperlinks, font metadata being displayed as part of the Firefox Inspector’s “Fonts” panel, SVG support improvements, and support for the CSS hyphenate-limit-chars property.

Downloads and more details on today’s Firefox 137 beta release via Mozilla.org.