And that's the thing IMHO - to some people Safari is an established brand, just like Firefox with its red-and-blue icon, or Chrome. I am rarely aware of the fact that Safari is a compass. If Apple didn't want to build a brand, they should probably just change the label to "Internet" (sic).

And the new Safari icon throws that brand away, which means that everyone has to learn -again- that the skinny white compass means "browser". And that the icon is inconsistent with every use of the icon before. All things that could have been avoided while still making the icon flat.