Favicons live on in the tab.
Not just live on, but are essential in navigation. I have so many open tabs that the favicon is the only differentiating thing between them. When I last tried to switch to FF from Chrome the lack of pre-cached favicons made all my bookmarks look like shit and I just couldn't stand it, so I bounced back.
On Firefox, you could go to the Library and right click the Bookmarks folder, choose "Open all in tabs". It'll take a moment but all your icons should be fetched afterwards.
Re:How We Got the Favicon (2017)
by kozziollek on Monday August 10, 2020 @02:35PM
(#24112492)
Just closed and reopened FF 79 and all icons are right there where I have left them.
Good point — I stand corrected, thanks!
And I don't remember seeing favicons of random web sites in the URL bar, which is how they were otherwise prominently featured when introduced.
So if anything, I would say their existence was short-lived but their demise was inevitable ;)
More interesting feature that was introduced with IE (3 I think) was link hovering, and Netscape only caught up with 4.0 which took ages to come out. That has changed the accepted styling for hyperlinks forever and was the first instance of smooth non-JS "animations" in wide use!
Another interesting thing was the "active desktop" that came out with IE4 I think, though that never caught on. It was still fun to put a web page as your desktop background on NT4 which I used during that time before moving full time to GNU/Linux.