I was actually surprised to hear that there are people against the new icon. The new icon is much better. The first one just raised so many questions:

• What the hell is it?
• Because no one knows what it is, why render it so realistically? 
• Why are there panels in the yellow part? Pointless details to add realism.
• Does the entire thing close together as it appears it should? Why?

The new icon looks like nothing because it IS nothing, which is a million times better than NOTHING trying to look like SOMETHING.

And what is up with that low-angle shot of the icon in the old one? Was that supposed to be a subtle, subconscious trick to assert dominance over the other browsers when it first came out? I can tell you right now that neither Windows, Mac, or most Linux distros use any icon sets where the low-angle is the default. Especially in the Mac OS X dock, it just looks completely out of place.

Now, I don’t think new icon is completely perfect, but I don’t see how anyone can see it as worse off. If I could tweak it, I would remove those triangles trying to add depth where the colors mix. I also would rotate the enter icon a little bit clockwise, to stop red from being perfectly parallel to the ground. It looks weird and looks even weirder at the smaller icon sizes. It adds an emphasis to the red’s importance for no reason.

Overall though: loving it.