Now that the Mozilla Firefox 43.0 has safely landed on our computers, the time has come to take a look at some of the upcoming features of the next major release of the popular web browser, Mozilla Firefox 44.0.

The first Beta build arrived today, December 18, 2015, and according to the official release notes, it will enable support for H.264 playback on GNU/Linux operating system if the cross-platform FFMpeg multimedia backend is installed, as well as WebM/VP9 video playback on machines that don't support MP4/H.264 content.

Unfortunately, at the moment of writing this article, Mozilla didn't write anything about the GTK3 integration for Linux, which failed to arrive in Firefox 42.0 (as initially promised), nor Firefox 43.0. However, Linux users might get Unicode-range descriptor support for web fonts, making font matching the same as on other OSes.

Among other changes that Mozilla might implement in Firefox 44.0, due for release on January 26, 2016, we can mention better warning pages for untrusted connections and certificate errors, new warning page for the RC4 cipher, along with the deprecation of the Equifax Secure Certificate Authority 1024-bit root certificate and UTN - DATACorp SGC for validation of secure website certificates.

If you're a bleeding-edge user and you want to run the latest Beta build of the Mozilla Firefox web browser on your Linux box, you can download the Mozilla Firefox 44.0 Beta 1 binaries right now from Softpedia, just please keep in mind that it's a pre-release version, not suitable for production use.