Missing browser bar favicons in Safari across all Mac devices

Greetings, I'm on a relatively new 2019 iMac running OS Big Sur 11.4 (but this isn't really relevant as this has been an issue for 8+ years at least.) I watch Mac events online and I notice Safari always has helpful colorful favicons in the browser bar. But none of my devices (desktop, phone, iPad Pro) seem to support favicon display (despite having favicons enabled in preferences). The problem follows me from Mac to Mac as I upgrade to new machines, and it's super annoying (to the point that I used Chrome for a very long time.)

Anyway I've attempted to troubleshoot this endless times (soooo much time wasted) via deleting prefs, history, replacing caches, etc. (Documented below.) Can anyone offer a fix? I spend a LOT of time in my browser for work, and I'm soooo tired of the gray, colorless life of the Safari browser bar.

Delete Safari’s favicon cache 1

If you’re experiencing favicons that aren’t right, maybe they have icons for different websites, clearing the cache and starting over is a good option.

1) Close and quit Safari.

2) Using Finder, click Go > Go to Folder from the menu bar

3) Enter ~/Library/Safari/Favicon Cache/ in the pop-up window and click Go.

4) Select all items in the cache folder and move them to the Trash. You can select all with the keyboard shortcut Command + A and then drag them to your Trash or right-click and pick Move to Trash.

5) Empty your Trash or alternatively, delete those items from it. (For help with both options, check out our tutorial on How to Empty Trash on Mac.)

6) Open Safari.

The Safari favicon cache folder will rebuild itself as you visit websites. And, you’ll need to visit the sites you have saved for the favicons to appear. But those that were incorrect or missing should show up correctly.

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Delete Safari’s favicon cache 2

The following workaround should however, restore the Web Page Icons in your Bookmarks list after the aforementioned Safari “Reset” makes them “disappear”. 

The Webpageicons.db file in ~/Library/Safari no longer needs to be replaced with a recent copy and again, there are no longer Webpageicons.db-shm and Webpageicons.db-wal files to delete. 

Instead, following a Safari “reset”, quit Safari. Then:

1) Inside the ~/Library/Safari folder, find the Favicon Cache folder. Open the Favicon Cache folder.

2) Delete the following files:

  favicons.db

  favicons.db-lock

  favicons.db-shm

  favicons.db-wal

  DO NOT DELETE THE FAVICONS FOLDER

The four deleted files will be regenerated when you re-launch Safari 11 and after relaunch, your Web Page Icons should display throughout your entire Bookmarks List in Safari 11.