Why doesn't Safari show me favicons any more?

Ah yes, when in doubt, use the brute force method. Sounds a lot like my typical problem solving strategy, actually. :-)

I'm guessing that you followed some online directions that said something like "To remove the icon cache, type rm -rf ~/Library/Safari/icons in the Terminal window."

If you did this, then not only did you remove all the icon cache files as you desire, but you also removed the "icons" folder itself!

To fix this problem, quit Safari then recreate the folder:

$  mkdir ~/Library/Safari/icons
$

then make sure it has the right permissions:

$  chmod 700 ~/Library/Safari/icons0
$

then restart Safari and see what happens.

I'm betting that'll fix it for you!