Discussion on question by Tomáš Zato: How do these icons work: 🌍🌎🌏✅️?

Stack Exchange

10:51

I can see these characters as colored icons: 🌍🌎🌏✅️ It only works in Firefox. For people who don't use Firefox, it looks like this: I can even see them in firebug and tab titles: And there's full file of them. I also did this document.title animation with them, which demonstrates t...

Tomáš Zato

I do not understand how is question about firefox not about software. What is it about then?

My question is, what IS it? Is that some firefox feature? Or is firefox implementing some draft of some standard?

Gypsy Spellweaver

Firefox and Chrome, in your system, are apparently using different font sets. Some, few, fonts support the emoji characters your Q is about. If you set Chrome to show the same font set as Firefox, then you will see them there too. The box with an X in it, or just empty, is typical for a font that cannot display the given character. Older font sets have very few characters and will show that for most of the non-ASCII characters even.

Celeritas

what I don't get is how some android keyboards can insert emoticons as characters even though they aren't unicode

Polygnome

They do work in Chrome, too. Slightly different (the check mark has a square background, not a round one, and the globes has a black outline), but close enough.

Mast

I'm using Firefox and my checkmark does not show a green circle around it. Not sure what you're asking, but can't reproduce.

Bort

10:51

@TomášZato - I'm using the latest Chrome and I see the first set as boxes, and the second set as per your image, so you have something backwards.

Tomáš Zato

@Bort I don't understand. All content of my question features same icons in same order: globe-europe-africa; globe-america; globe-asia-australia; white tick in green field.

JAB

For me in Firefox (on Ubuntu), the icons are black and white.

Anmol Singh Jaggi

I can only see the black-and-white version of these icons; and I am using the latest Firefox on Ubuntu.

Jon Hanna

@Celeritas because they are Unicode? They're generally either emoji or else combinations of Unicode characters such as : followed by ) with perhaps - in between.

Todd Wilcox

These icons are full color and 3D in Safari.

Tomáš Zato

10:51

@ToddWilcox Could you elaborate on what does 3D icon look like?

Monty Harder

Characters are not icons. "Icon" means something specific in Windows, which does not apply here.

Celeritas

@YisroelTech a few reasons. One would be that not all emoticons display the same on each device, if they are displayed at all.

Yisroel Tech

@Celeritas that is - as I wrote in my answer - because the Unicode standard defines "what" a character is and not the exact design it has. Each OS or application can do its own design, and each application, OS, and font have their own choice which characters they adopt and which they do not.