Safari stopped showing avatars

On observablehq.com, Safari stopped showing avatars, instead showing a grey filled circle. Firefox and Chrome work fine.

I’ve removed all cookies and all history, restarted Safari several times, restarted my Mac. Problem persists.

Any clues?

Safari Version 16.4.1
MacOS 12.6.5

I see user Avatars on my profile page with Safari. My Mac OS is up to date but my Safari version is woefully out of date, as I rarely use it. It does sound like a weird cache related issue, though.

Could you try viewing it in incognito mode and see if that works?

Same symptoms. That is, same grey filled avatars.

Also tried, to no avail:

  • Developer > Empty Caches
  • Developer > Disable Images, Enable Images

Do you see any messages in the DevTools console or any failing network requests?

Console shows no errors.
Sources > Images do show the avatars, though.

Do get two identical URLs, but with different parameters:

I do see references like: data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAEAAAABCAAAAAA6fptVAAAACklEQVR4nGOaCQAAnwCc1NtUdAAAAABJRU5ErkJggg==

Should show as mbostock’s avatar, yet doesn’t.

Identical symptoms if I switch to another user on same Mac.

Now I am suspicious about Safari 16.4.1.

I am on 16.4 and MacOS 13.3.1 and things look correct on mine.

Tried to revert to 16.4 from Time Machine, but macOS does not allow me to.

(Cannot use macOS 13 or later because of late 2015 iMac.)