text replacement not working in Safari

I have an old MBP (2009) and recently bought a new iMac. Copied everything over from the old one using the TimeMachine backup. Old OS was 10.9.5.

Pretty much everything has been working except for a few applications that don't work. I've contacted those vendors for that.

In fact, the most annoying broken thing is the keyboard text substitution. The shortcuts show up in the System Preference pane. But they don't work when I try to use them in an application. There aren't that many, but I use them a lot. Simple things like a couple different email addresses, user names, not passwords of course.

Deleted them all and re-entered them. No luck. They work in TextEdit. But not in Safari, of Firefox, or Microsoft apps.

Oddly enough, they work in this text entry window. For instance I can type the shortcut to show the apple icon,  like that, and it shows up. Just doesn't work on any other web page text entry fields that I use. There may be more that I don't know about, but I don't care about them.

In another KB article I found a suggestion to copy and past the shortcuts to the desktop and then back again. Didn't work.

I posted this question in the Mac OS Sierra discussion, and someone suggested testing the issue in safe boot mode, and with a guest account.

The result was to narrow down the problem to text entry fields on web pages while browsing with Safari, or FireFox or Chrome. Text replacement works with TextEdit, and Mail, Preview and also in the URL/address field in those three browsers.

So it's not just Safari, but the other browsers I mentioned. But this is the Safari discussion so I'll accept any help I can get.