I have Safari 2.0.4 installed (419.3) and am running WebKit nightly builds. Favicons for pages I've visited usually appear in History and in bookmarks within folders in my bookmarks bar. However every day or so all of my favicons disappear and reset to the default blue globe. I am not entirely certain what is causing this and don't know where to start to reproduce it reliably. However, I do sometimes see both Safari and WebKit in the dock. I do not know what's triggering at the same time as WebKit.app it to run. I have WebKit set as my default browser in Safari preferences. WebKit version r25915. Thank you.
There's a few potential things going on here. First off, WebKit has a newer icon database format from Safari 2. So the first time you launch WebKit, you *will* lose all of your Safari 2 icons. This is by design, to upgrade your Safari 2 icons. However, this one time conversion should happen only once. You weren't at all clear about how often you've seen this, so if it was only once... not a problem! Secondly, the SPI of the icon database itself has moved from a synchronous model to a fully asynchronous model. This means when Safari asks for an icon, sometimes it doesn't get the actual icon right away but instead it is notified later when the icon is read in from disk. Safari 2 doesn't support these notifications, so when you're running WebKit.app you might notice that history/bookmarks don't have icons showing the first time you view them. But, in general, this bug is kind of vague about exactly what is going on - can you narrow down steps like, in what order you launched Safari 2 and WebKit.app, whether or not you'd launched WebKit.app before, etc etc.? To "start over" with your icons, you can delete both ~/Library/Safari/Icons/ (Safari 2 style) and ~/Library/Safari/WebpageIcons.db (or just Icons.db for older WebKits) for Safari 3 style.
Thank you for your explanation. I can reproduce the bug by quitting WebKit, installing the nightly build, and launching the new WebKit. (As I did this morning.) If Safari 2 is not getting the icons then it seems clear that the database is not done "loading" before Safari 2 asks for the icons. :-) The only way to fix this is to ensure the database is loaded before Safari 2 asks for the icons. Perhaps? Maybe with all the quits/launches of the day the database and/or webkit's code is already cached by the system and loads faster? It's only after upgrading, when things aren't cached, that the load moves more slowly. I'll be running Safari 3 soon. This may not be a big issue unless you really want to support favicons in Safari 2? PS - I've deleted ~/Library/Safari/Icons many times to try to fix this issue to no avail.
I've Safari 3 & latest WebKit feature branch installed. Favicons disappear on each WebKit restart. Some of them do appear after opening-closing-opening the bookmarks folder but never on the first opening right after the restart.
http://trac.webkit.org/projects/webkit/wiki/Known%20incompatibilities%20between%20open-source%20WebKit%20and%20Safari This will be fixed once Apple releases Safari updates.