A wild guess: Have you already visited some pages / domains of bookmarks on your new laptop that are in your bookmark bar? I usually know this sort of behavior that all "unvisited" pages have a globe icon and only visited ones will "switch" to the page-specific one.

What about opening one of the globe-icon bookmarks? Does the globe icon get replaced by the site-specific one?

Yes, if I click on them and visit the page, some of the icons go from "globe" icon to the site-specific icon. Not all. Makes it challenging to see where one is navigating to.

Still don't understand why they're not all populated in the syncing process.

Do you see the favicon on the Tab bar if you visit a bookmark that has the generic globe icon ?

Some websites instruct the browser not to cache the favicon and in that case you may not get the favicon.

• Cache Favicons for Bookmarks https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/cache-favicons-for-bookmarks/

If you use Sync then best is to disconnect Sync temporarily during troubleshooting.

This can be caused by a problem with the places.sqlite and favicons.sqlite databases in the Firefox profile folder.

• use "Verify Integrity" button on the "Help -> Troubleshooting Information" (about:support) page

If errors are reported with "Verify Integrity", close and restart Firefox and retry.

If "Verify Integrity" cannot repair places.sqlite, rename/remove all places.sqlite and favicons.sqlite files in the Firefox profile folder. Firefox will rebuild places.sqlite and restore the bookmarks from a recent JSON backup in the bookmarkbackups folder.

• keep a backup copy of places.sqlite in case a new places.sqlite database has to be created

See also:

• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/Bookmarks+not+saved#w_fix-the-bookmarks-file
• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/fix-bookmarks-and-history-will-not-be-functional

You can use the button on the "Help -> Troubleshooting Information" (about:support) page to go to the current Firefox profile folder or use the about:profiles page.

• Help -> Troubleshooting Information -> Profile Folder/Directory:
  Windows: Open Folder; Linux: Open Directory; Mac: Show in Finder
• https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/profiles-where-firefox-stores-user-data

2020-09-10 - I have had issues with bookmark favicons not working for about 3 or 4 years, completely installing and uninstalling fire-fox many, many times, using different computers, always the latest version of Windows 10, using fire-fox sync, using 3rd party bookmark managers - often when importing bookmarks, there is no favicon, and I need to open every bookmark to load the favicon - can you please allow favicons to work normally in fire-fox?