As you may already know, Firefox is being developed on three separate channels. First, the features are implemented in the developer branch, they reach the beta channel when enough tests have been performed and finally, some of the new features from the betas get included in the stable version of Firefox.
Recently, Firefox 44.0 Beta 1 has been released, bringing improvements.
New features:
- Improved warning pages for certificate errors and untrusted connections
- Enable H.264 on Linux when FFmpeg is available
- Enable WebM/VP9 video support on systems that don’t support MP4/H.264
Changed:
- Warning page when RC4 is the only supported cipher
- Firefox will no longer trust the Equifax Secure Certificate Authority 1024-bit root certificate or the UTN – DATACorp SGC to validate secure website certificates
- To support unicode-range descriptor for webfonts, font matching under Linux now uses the same font matching code as other platforms
For more information, see the official changelog for yourself.
Installation instructions:
Mozilla does not provide a repository for its Firefox browser, but the installation steps are quite easy anyway and should not create difficulties on any Linux distribution.
The latest versions of Firefox are available as pre-compiled libraries via the Mozilla FTP, so we need to download the archive (i386 or i686 for 32 bit systems and amd64 or x86_64 for 64 bit systems), extract it and run the firefox file. Also, it is advised to remove previous versions of Firefox, move Firefox to /opt and create a symlink, for an easier usage.
The below instructions should work on all the popular Linux systems, including Ubuntu, Linux Mint, Pinguy OS, Elementary OS, Deepin, Peppermint, LXLE, Linux Lite, Debian, Robolinux, SparkyLinux, Fedora, CentOS, OpenSUSE, Mageia, OpenMandriva, Arch Linux, Manjaro, ROSA Desktop etc.
How to install Firefox Beta on 32 bit Linux systems:
$ wget https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/44.0b1/linux-i686/en-US/firefox-44.0b1.tar.bz2
$ tar -xjvf firefox-44.0b1.tar.bz2
$ sudo rm -rf /opt/firefox*
$ sudo mv firefox /opt/firefox
$ sudo ln -sf /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox
To start Firefox, just open a terminal, type firefox and hit enter.
How to install Firefox Beta on 64 bit Linux systems:
$ wget https://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/44.0b1/linux-x86_64/en-US/firefox-44.0b1.tar.bz2
$ tar -xjvf firefox-44.0b1.tar.bz2
$ sudo rm -rf /opt/firefox*
$ sudo mv firefox /opt/firefox
$ sudo ln -sf /opt/firefox/firefox /usr/bin/firefox
To start Firefox, just open a terminal, type firefox and hit enter.