The upcoming Firefox 3.5 release is quite an important one. Not only does it include features like private browsing, but also TraceMonkey to speed up JavaScript, a faster way of rendering pages, color profile support (on by default, with performance enhancements) and many more changes. Alex Faaborg, User Experience Designer at Mozilla, therefor wants to alter the icon of Firefox, to show the internal changes externally.

Currently the new icon is in iteration 5 and sports the fox with a much spikeyer tail, while reducing a bit of furryness compared with previous iterations.

The new icon is based on work done previously by Jon Hicks (working at Opera now), Stephen Horlander and Anthony Piraino (The Iconfactory). And as will almost all icons at Mozilla, it looks quite good (yes Opera, you should use a new icon, right now, after all these years of hearing complains about it).

Of course artwork doesn't end with a new icon/logo just yet. For Firefox 4 better system integration is a priority, especially the current looks are not top-notch when using Windows Vista/7.