Firefox has merged support for Vulkan Video decoding into its development tree.
Vulkan Video is a set of extensions to the Vulkan graphics API, maintained by the Khronos Group, that offloads video decoding from the CPU to the GPU. The merge brings this acceleration path into Firefox's main codebase, putting it on track for a future stable release. Vulkan is cross-platform by design, so the change is not exclusive to any single operating system, though Linux stands to gain the most given how fractured hardware video acceleration has historically been there.
Hardware video decoding matters for anyone streaming a lot of content or working on battery: GPUs handle the task far more efficiently than CPUs, with meaningfully less heat. Firefox has trailed Chromium-based browsers in this area for years, especially on Linux, where alternatives like VA-API require careful driver alignment to work reliably and often do not out of the box.
The merge is a prerequisite, not a shipping feature. Expect flags, testing cycles, and driver caveats before this reaches most users by default.