I don’t know the name for them - the little icon that are in the location field in front of the url, and in the history list.
I’m using Safari, and it used to be that there would be little gold and blue “SD” icons. Then a few days ago it reverted to the Safari default, a little blue and white globe. Then the “SD” icon came back. Tonight, it’s the little default globe.
Prolly your cache needs clearing. Or there may not be enough memory available ( causing glitches rather than not enough memory to hold infinitesimal them ).
Clearing the browser cache has no effect on the operating system or any of it’s caches/tmp files.
I don’t know about Safari, however here is a thread on clearing the cache from 2012.
You can enable the Develop menu to clear the cache if you don’t want to clear your history…
From your Safari menu bar click Safari > Preferences then select the Advanced tab.
Select: Show Develop menu in menu bar
Now from the menu bar click Develop > Empty Caches*
Apple.Inc Support Forums
Remember you only want to clear the cache ( full of seen files preserved by the browser for instant recall ), not your history. Some people like to nuke the history, bookmarks etc., but I have no idea why.
I’d restart after that.
This is not guaranteed to help, but stuff does get warped unless cleared out occasionally.