With Firefox 3.5 nearing completion, it has been revealed that many of the icons is Firefox 3.5 are being refreshed and updated.

Across all 4 platforms, around 25 icons are being tweaked or are entirely new, such as the geolocation icons.

The new icons are available now in the latest nightly builds, but will be included in any Release Candidates and the final release of 3.5

Mozilla Labs have released a new project called Jetpack. The project is a  “newly formed experiment in using open Web technologies to enhance the browser, with the goal of allowing anyone who can build a Web site to participate in making the Web a better place to work, communicate and play” says Mozilla.

The aim is to allow web developers to design add-ons for Firefox using just HTML, JavaScript and CSS.

A download for Firefox is available along with more information, documentation, and videos from the Jetpack website.

It looks like Firefox 3.5 is set to get a new logo, after Mozilla set out to update Firefox’s logo in a bid to reflect the changes in the upcoming browser. The current logo has been the same since Firefox 1.5.

“In a marketplace that is focused on products that are newer, faster, lighter and shinier, design work is inherently perishable. Part of this is larger trends and fashion (for a period of time cars had fins), and part of this is simply ongoing visual change as an indication of overall progress” explained Alex Faaborg, a Firefox User Experience team member.

The final design is still not decided on, but Faaborg has been posting different renderings daily on his blog.

Mozilla Labs has started a design challenge seeking to encourage innovation and experimentation in user interface design for the Web. The aim is to reinvent tabs, as many users today will often have 10-20 tabs open at anyone time.

“The browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive” says the Mozilla website. “If you have more than seven or eight tabs open they become pretty much useless. And tabs don’t work well if you use them with heterogeneous information. They’re a good solution to keep the screen tidy for the moment.”

Users are able to enter the design challenge by submitting mock-ups of what they think could be possible solutions. Entries need to be in by June 21st 2009, with the winner being announced July 8th 2009.

Full details can be found on the Mozilla Labs Design Challenge website.

After weeks of delays associated with the most recent two Firefox 3.5 beta’s, Mozilla is now on track to deliver Firefox 3.5 release candidate (RC) 1 in June.

“We’re setting an aggressive code freeze target of next Wednesday, May 20th  for Firefox 3.5 RC” said Firefox Director Mike Beltzner. This puts “the RC release somewhere in the first week of June.”

Currently, there are still outstanding code blocking bugs stopping Firefox 3.5 from hitting RC status. Provided they are all completed in time, we may even see a final release of Firefox 3.5 sometime in late June or early July.

Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 can be downloaded in the mean time from the Firefox beta website.

Mozilla, famous for Firefox, has released Prism 1.0 beta to the public.

The application which is yet to see mainstream media attention, allows users to turn some websites into downloadable applications which they can use on their computer when they are offline.

Prism works on Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.

More information plus a download link can be found on the Mozila Prism website.

A new project has been started by Mozilla with the aim of splitting up Firefox over several processes, with one process for the user interface, and one process for each open tab.

This is similar to both Google Chrome, and Internet Explorer 8, which both use multiple processes. The advantage of this is that if one tab crashes, it only closes one tab, rather than all open tabs, increasing the general stability of the browser.

The multi-process approach also allows the browser to take use of multiple CPU cores which are increasingly becoming the standard.

At this stage, it doesn’t seem like we will see a full release of this technology in Firefox for at least a year. More information on the project can be found in the Mozilla Links blog.

After the recent row between developers of the AdBlock Plus and NoScript add-ons for Firefox, Mozilla is considering creating an add-on policy. Mozilla’s proposal follows.

Changes to default home page and search preferences, as well as settings of other installed add-ons, must be related to the core functionality of the add-on. If this relation can be established, you must adhere to the following requirements when making changes to these settings:

• The add-on description must clearly state what changes the add-on makes.
• All changes must be ‘opt-in’, meaning the user must take non-default action to enact the change.
• Uninstalling the add-on restores the user’s original settings if they were changed.

These are minimum requirements and not a guarantee that your add-on will be approved.

NoScripts developer has already agreed to this policy and has released an update to its extension.

Both Mozilla’s Firefox and Google’s Chrome have continued their upward trends through April, increasing their market share. Firefox increased it’s share to 22.5%, up half a percent on last month, while Google Chrome was up around a quarter of a percent to 1.4% share.

Internet Explorer on the other hand continued to bleed users, slumping for another month. Despite the release of Internet Explorer 8, the browser lost almost three quarters of a percent to finish of the month with 66.1% market share.

Both Apple’s Safari and Opera stayed steady for the month, with 8.2% and 0.7% market shares respectively.

More detailed results can be seen using Market Share by Net Applications.

A war has broken out between two of Firefox’s most used plug-ins, AdBlock Plus and NoScript, with both scripts trying to out do each other by disabling the others features.

The war started as a result of AdBlock Plus blocking ads in NoScript’s change log window. The change log window is displayed every time NoScript is updated, which as of late has been rather frequent, and is NoScript’s only source of income.

AdBlock is of course doing what it does best, blocking ads, regardless of the source. The AdBlock blog has a full list of events as they see the current situation.