How To Install Firefox 3.7 (4.0) With WebM Support In Ubuntu Linux [PPA]

WebM is a new open source project suppored by Google, Mozilla, Opera and many others which uses the VP8 video codec Google aquired from On2 as well as Vorbis audio for HTML5 videos (HTML5 uses a built-in codec so you don't need Adobe Flash for viewing videos from YouTube for instance - which results in a very low processor usage compared to Flash and so on).

Firefox 3.7 (soon to be 4.0) got WebM support yesterday. The Ubuntu Mozilla Daily PPA for Ubuntu got this new builds so you can finally install Firefox with WebM support in Ubuntu - for 32bit only for now.

Besides WebM, Firefox 3.7 (4.0) from the Mozilla Daily PPA also features the new extension manager:

Please note that Firefox 3.7 is unstable so expect to find bugs! Also, this PPA will update your Firefox 3.6 to the nightly. If you don't want this, after installing Firefox 3.7, remove the PPA!

Install Firefox 3.7 (aka 4.0) in Ubuntu using the following commands:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:ubuntu-mozilla-daily/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install firefox-3.7

Firefox too needs libvpx but for some reason, this is not available in the Ubuntu Mozilla Daily PPA. But you can install this from Chromium Daily PPA:

sudo add-apt-repository ppa:chromium-daily/ppa
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install libvpx0

And there you have it - Firefox 3.7 (aka 4.0) with WebM support.

To use WebM on YouTube, enable HTML5 and try some WebM videos like this one. Note: for some reason I was unable to view videos in 360p using WebM, but the videos in 720p worked great.