Alex Faaborg, a principal designer on Mozilla's Firefox browser software, says they're working on a refresh of the red fox in the same way Microsoft has refreshed its blue "e" for Internet Explorer.

"Our plan is to get the icon updated in the product itself, and on mozilla.com in places where we are specifically talking about Firefox 3.5 in time for the launch," Faaborg writes.

"We'll of course make images available at a range of resolutions as soon as we finalize them so people can update download buttons and other instances of the Firefox 3.5 icon during the Release Candidate phase, while we are thoroughly testing the application," he writes. "There admittedly isn't as much time as everyone would like, but that's the nature of a very competitive (and exciting) marketplace."

For Mozilla, its community and users, the red fox curled around a globe isn't just a symbol. It's also been a nifty marketing tool for the open-source Web browser that is sold on baseball caps, T-shirts and more.

"One doesn't need to walk more than two feet in the Mountain View office to run into the current Firefox logo, so I have a pretty visceral sense of how disruptive shipping a new icon would be," Faaborg writes. "In fact, we were so worried about the logistics of doing an update around the time of launching Firefox 3 that we ultimately decided to cancel the project entirely. In retrospect, my opinion is that a gradual transition (and the logistical challenges that come with it) is worth not being frozen in time."

With more competition in the browser space—not just from IE 8, but also from Safari, Opera and Google Chrome—Mozilla certainly doesn't want to start losing mind share.

Faaborg also said Mozilla is working with a third party—Iconfactory—that makes, among other things, the Twitterific iPhone client for Twitter. And, he said, Mozilla will keep the color the same but work on changing what the fox's tail looks like.