Chrome For OS X Catches Up With Safari's Emoji Support

According to The Next Web, Emoji support has landed in the latest developer builds of Chrome for OS X, meaning that emoji can be seen on websites and be entered into text fields for the first time without issues. ... Users on Safari on OS X could already see emoji on the Web without issue, since Apple built that in. The bug in Chrome was fixed on December 11, which went into testing on Chrome’s Canary track recently. From there, we can expect it to move to the consumer version of Chrome in coming weeks.

Comments

This should really be two articles...

[Anonymous Coward]

Based on most Android and iOS articles I've read on /., this should really be two articles:

1. Apple ships support for Emoji ships, but it's rubbish and no one needs it anyway.
2. Google's amazing new Emoji for is almost ready to ship, revolutionising web browsing on OS X.

Re:This should really be two articles...

[stephanruby]

1. Apple ships support for Emoji ships, but it's rubbish and no one needs it anyway.
2. Google's amazing new Emoji for is almost ready to ship, revolutionising web browsing on OS X.

And Chrome Emoji support only works on OS X, whatever that means.

I assume that the unlucky Windows users and the unlucky Linux users will be left without the ability to express emotions on the internet anymore. That's the real tragedy here. The fact that all Windows and Linux users will be left emotionless if they can't afford to switch to OS X. As a Linux user, this makes me cry inside, but the best I can manage is this poor looking emoticon instead. :,-(

Oh damn you Linux! Damn you!! Why do you have to be so late at copying the big core features from everybody? If only Linux had come up with Emoji support a couple of years before everybody else, Desktop Linux would now be reaching 90% of the desktop market at the very least.

Re: This should really be two articles...

[stephanruby]

This is terrible. Without the ability to send me the pile-of-crap emoji, my wife...

You better not let her read this post, otherwise it's the red-fuming-mad Emoji, closely followed by silent-treatment Emoji, and you're-sleeping-on-the-couch Emoji.

Re:This should really be two articles...

[worf_mo]

Also, by splitting up TFA it would result in two manageable articles (about the size of TFS) for those with attention impairments.

Re:This should really be two articles...

[rwa2]

Based on most Android and iOS articles I've read on /., this should really be two articles:

1. Apple ships support for Emoji ships, but it's rubbish and no one needs it anyway.
2. Google's amazing new Emoji for is almost ready to ship, revolutionising web browsing on OS X.

3. Firefox announces an filter to remove Emoji from your web experience. Plugin available that converts Emoji to ASCII art.
e.g. OGC Turn your head sideways to the left to see the little wanker.

Who gives a fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

A) No one here uses emoji
B) No one here gives a fuck if you can enter emoji into a text field.
C) Why the fuck is the fact that you cant put emoji in a TEXT field considered a bug. Its a fucking TEXT field.

Re: Who gives a fuck

[wasabioss]

I doðY(TM)

Re: Who gives a fuck

[tysonedwards]

While it is absolutely the case that emoji has no place in certain text fields, as a web browser it is Chrome's responsibility to handle all valid and compliant UTF-8 symbols, including emoji symbols, within the application. Emoji are not some imaginary pseudo-symbol type or image format sent in-line. Where the symbol is seen, an image from a font will be displayed instead of a conventional character. As such, is it really that different than needing to support Cyrillic characters in text fields?

Re:Who gives a fuck

[Anonymous Coward]

Racist, seriously?
You're and idiot.

Re:Who gives a fuck

[blang]

I consider then harmful.
I suspect Emoji are like those smileys with mustaches, beer steins, and birthday cakes that show up in skype chat.
I hate that garbage. Many a time, I write a sentence that contains a parenhtesis, using grammar correctly, and then my message comes across as some random retarded shit sprinkled with smileys. I have a hard enough time avoiding typos, I don't really need the client mucking it up even worse.
Or pasting small code samples. I sure hope nobody is passing each other code snippets in skype for the next mars mission. Does mustache smiley mean greater than or less than or modulus?

Re:Who gives a fuck

[tgv]

I agree. Using the f-word does not make someone racist. Emoji are a bad solution to a insignificant problem. The fact that people use that solution anyway doesn't change that.

Re: Who gives a fuck

[Carewolf]

While it is absolutely the case that emoji has no place in certain text fields, as a web browser it is Chrome's responsibility to handle all valid and compliant UTF-8 symbols, including emoji symbols, within the application. Emoji are not some imaginary pseudo-symbol type or image format sent in-line. Where the symbol is seen, an image from a font will be displayed instead of a conventional character. As such, is it really that different than needing to support Cyrillic characters in text fields?

It was already working. This was just allowing Chrome to use the color fonts for Emoji on Mac. They were already supporting color fonts on Linux.

Re:Who gives a fuck

[Mr_Silver]

I consider then harmful.
I suspect Emoji are like those smileys with mustaches, beer steins, and birthday cakes that show up in skype chat. I hate that garbage. Many a time, I write a sentence that contains a parenhtesis, using grammar correctly, and then my message comes across as some random retarded shit sprinkled with smileys. I have a hard enough time avoiding typos, I don't really need the client mucking it up even worse.

That's not the fault of Emoji, that is the fault of the client replacing things like ":)" and ";P" with pictures in order to simulate Emjoi.

As bizarre as it sounds, you actually want to be embracing the support of Emoji! This is because all the searching and replacing logic (which, as you rightly pointed out, tends to make unwanted changes to your text) is now redundant and can be removed by the developers.

The net result is that people can still insert smileys with moustaches, beer steins, and birthday cakes and you can still type grammatically correct messages (or code) without fear of them being replaced with pictures. A win for everyone.

Re:Who gives a fuck

[AmiMoJo]

Many a time, I write a sentence that contains a parenhtesis, using grammar correctly, and then my message comes across as some random retarded shit sprinkled with smileys.

In that case you should welcome Unicode emoji support. Rather than trying to parse sequences of characters into emoji, there are now dedicated code points for them. The more they are used the less your parenthesis will get messed up.

Emoji actually bring a lot of value to some people. They started in Japan as kaomoji, before spreading. Without going into the detail of Japanese language they express things quickly that would otherwise require careful selection of multiple words. They also add a lot of humour, which is originally why they became popular on sites like 2ch. There was no issue with the originally because they were just text, it's when programmers started trying to decode certain sequences that the problems started.

Re:Who gives a fuck

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

I would reply with a long list of pile of poop emoji but slashdot doesn't even support UTF-8

Re:Who gives a fuck

[stoploss]

A) No one here uses emoji
B) No one here gives a fuck if you can enter emoji into a text field.
C) Why the fuck is the fact that you cant put emoji in a TEXT field considered a bug. Its a fucking TEXT field.

It will seem ironic to the community when Dice rolls out emoji support in Slashcode while still forbidding most Unicode characters.

You know it's coming.

Re:Who gives a fuck

[complete loony]

You want to embrace emoji? Here, try texting using only emoji characters (including usernames).

Great, make the Internet even more infantile

[marienf]

Oh great, more tiny pictures chosen by some arbitrary process, so that everyone's expression becomes more the same and more like the plastic people in soap operas, and even less language proficiency. A whole generation of TV-watchers and Social Media Addicts already talks that way, and now we want to have symbols so we can express THAT more efficiently in WRITING? Exactly what we need..

I make me don't want Net Neutrality after all. I'm now willing to pay for an Internet fast lane that requires an IQ test.

Oh but wait.. Apple.. right.. who cares..

Re:Great, make the Internet even more infantile

[marienf]

Erratum to avoid jokes about language proficiency:

and *with* even less language proficiency
I*t* makes me *not* want Net Neutrality

Re:Great, make the Internet even more infantile

[beakerMeep]

You >:-o bro?

Re:Great, make the Internet even more infantile

[thegarbz]

I make me don't want Net Neutrality after all.

I'm sorry could you re-write that bit in Emoji, I couldn't understand it.

Re:Great, make the Internet even more infantile

[marienf]

> Or are you suggesting the world should be ASCII only?

I agree that we should make sure that our legacy of >5000 years of written language can be represented using whatever means of communications are currently in vogue. This is covered by Unicode/UTF. Great, so far.

However, I'm also suggesting that during those 5000+ years of written, and what is probably about a million years of spoken language, we have developed words, some of which express emotional state and attitude, inperfectly, of course, but please refer to the Great Poets in any culture. It can be done, and it has been done exquisitely by some.

Humans have been struggling to express their emotions in words, for millenia, and we're making progress.. Therefore, I loathe seeing all those subtle possibilities of expression replaced by a small subset of visual babytalk, taking us back to the level of grunting and shrieking, basically.

Bottom line of what I'm trying to say is: There are plenty of baby-faces in the standards already. If some group (you mention the Japanese) want to occasionally forego their magnificent written culture and make baby-faces at each other: why not: The technology is already there and they have been known to do far crazier things over there. What I don't think we need is to *standardise* some visual NewSpeak to dumb down *everyone's* communications.

> What about all those BBS/ANSI characters from zillions of documents from the 80s?
Yeah, what about them? They can all be represented. What's your point? I've been using :-) and :-( and ~%-} and such for decades. They're no replacement for the appropriate choice of words! There's no reason to formalise them!

Oh speaking of which, I confess to sneaking in control characters on BBS chat systems, I also confess to sneaking in UTF symbols into XMPP chat systems (my nick "had 5 stars"). That was cute for all of 30 minutes. Today, when I see that email that despairs of it's own lack of contents by using some graphical UTF-8 in the Subject:, I have pity on the author (but not on the message itself).

WKR,
-f

Re:Great, make the Internet even more infantile

[marienf]

Referring to my erratum, seconds after that post:

> Erratum to avoid jokes about language proficiency:
>and *with* even less language proficiency
> I*t* makes me *not* want Net Neutrality

Re:Great, make the Internet even more infantile

[k3vlar]

It would have been, but he's not running Mac OS X, you insensitive clod!

Re:Great, make the Internet even more infantile

[Bing Tsher E]

There used to be a control-character sequence you could send on multiline chat BBSes such that if you entered it, all terminals receiving it would echo it back.

Needless to say you could enter the sequence and set off everybodys' terminals echoing it back and take down a large chatroom. The trick was doing it in such a way that nobody could tell it was you that did it. I think the sequence was [esc]-Z.

Re:Great, make the Internet even more infantile

[AmiMoJo]

Humans have been struggling to express their emotions in words, for millenia, and we're making progress.. Therefore, I loathe seeing all those subtle possibilities of expression replaced by a small subset of visual babytalk, taking us back to the level of grunting and shrieking, basically.

That's a rather elitist attitude, don't you think? Not everyone can be a great poet, and I bet even the ones who are just want to fire off a quick email sometimes without being misunderstood. It's been well understood for decades that the lack of tone in text-only communications can make it hard to know when people are joking, for example, so emoji add some useful clarification.

I think it's better than people are encouraged to communicate, even if they use a lot of emoji, than to discourage them by demanding a higher standard of language. They know that they suck, they have seen books and copied their homework off Wikipedia, but at least this way they are getting some practice and might want to improve.

Re:Great, make the Internet even more infantile

[Black.Shuck]

WKR,
-f

I was with you right up to this curious hieroglyph.

What does it mean?

Re:Great, make the Internet even more infantile

[tlhIngan]

I agree that we should make sure that our legacy of >5000 years of written language can be represented using whatever means of communications are currently in vogue. This is covered by Unicode/UTF. Great, so far.

Actually, the real reason is a bit simpler.

Unicode aims to be the coding system to rule all coding systems - the stated goal is to be able to encode all existing encoding systems into Unicode, and to convert it back.

The problem (and why Unicode had to add all the extra emoji) was the Japanese character sets were incomplete - it was not possible encode them into Unicode (the missing emoji did not map to a code point) and back again without losing information.

Now, switching between code sets well, you've got to make compromises. But when you're just converting between a code set and back again, the translation should be seamless.

So for Unicode, that meant incorporating the last set of new emojis that got added between the last pass and now, hence adding another 256 of them so Unicode could maintain the translation.

As for why, well, some engineer at NTT DoCoMo thought it would be more convenient way back in the 90s. And until Unicode, it turned out there was no rhyme or reason for the icons - even other carriers had their own sets making texting between carriers interesting.

Re:Great, make the Internet even more infantile

[jellomizer]

{sarcasm}Because to be intelligent, you must not be light hearted. {sarcasm}
There is a difference between child like and childish. So sure we can have a funny cartoon characters to express emotion, without the quality of the discussion diminished.

But there is so many people who have a hard time realizing that different places have a different level of formality. Yes if you are making a scientific paper, adding little cartoons will distract from the content, as these papers should be rather dense in fact, and not expressing your feeling. However for the bulk of the internet it is less formal, and the fact we want to show emotion on it should be represented as well.
 

Fuck Emoji

[Maow]

Subject says it all.

A plague on the internet and SMS those shitty, retarded little pieces of shit.

Re:Fuck Emoji

[blang]

Keep your plastic toddler emotions to yourself. or we will toss your hello kitty backpack a grinder and use as cat litter.

Re:Fuck Emoji

[xyzzymage]

Two problems with that theory...
1) Character limits aren't an issue on the vast majority of the web, and the exceptions (like /. signatures) often don't allow emoji.
2) Emoji sent via SMS are usually sent on their own, like the equivalent of responding to "see you later" with *kiss.*

Re:Fuck Emoji

[Maow]

Are you being sarcastic?

No.

No seriously basic pictures have formed a nice little ability to convey emotion without eating into character limits. Now common and let me give you a hug you angry man \( )/.

If they were used only when space / bandwidth is limited, that would be a different story.

Instead they're used pervasively on forums where technical discussions are supposed to be happening:

How do I ___ the ___ from v1.2.1 via package manager XYZ *smilie* *winkie*

No character limits there, just an expression of idiocy.

Or WhatsApp - I've seen messages there (I don't use it myself) that were more emoticons than characters - and not infrequently.

And those are often in a pictographic language in the first place (traditional Chinese) - they still look stupid. And there are no character limits.

I'll only mention IRC as it's infested with them even though there can be good information interspersed.

It's a dumbing down of communication.

The internet does NOT need a laugh track. They suck on TV and they suck in emoticons.

There is quite a bigger problem still waiting

[Archimonde]

Instead of making Chrome usable on mac laptops, we get emoji support...

Guys, just fix the high CPU/battery usage already please. Thanks!

Am I

[Ranger]

suppose to care?

Re:Am I

[epyT-R]

Apparently.

Re:who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

That explains the nausea inducing levels of 'cutesy'.. Character based emoticons were bad enough, but this is a whole new level of putrid. Like emoticons, they're obviously meant for morons who can't grasp context in textual communications and expect the emotional reassurance that's normally given to children.

People just need to learn how to read again.

agree with harmful

[marienf]

Agree with this one. It regularly happens to me, as well.
I mean, I can sort of live with messages from people using Windows containing some sort of elongated lowercase j where, I learned years ago, they had inserted a smiley face and mistakenly assumed that this would be universally seen as such, but it's a whole different game where we're trying to be compact and logical, by using certain symbols such as brackets etc.. only to find one's correspondent is puzzled by the emotions conveyed by some round-headed Simpsons faces rendered by their email clients instead of what we meant. Not to mention the shame of apparently unpaired brackets.. Sorry for the long sentences: I'm in a hurry..

Re:agree with harmful

[lisaparratt]

Which is why Emoji is important - it's the *solution* to this problem, because it replaces arbitrary character sequences with dedicated code points. As long as there's an easy way to enter them, the substitutions can be eliminated.

What about battery life

[thetoadwarrior]

Chrome has awful battery life compared to any other browser. We need that more than smilies.

Bloat

[Celarent Darii]

Another reason browsers are way too bloated. This stuff does not come for free. Not to mention the possible security implications. What happens when a malformed emoj is put in the address field? What about in the preferences? What about as a http-header?

Seriously, some features should just not be implemented, just like kids should not be given everything they ask for. Not everything you want is good for you, nor good for the internet.

And get off my lawn.

Re:Bloat

[captjc]

Really? Emoji as they are being described here are part of the Unicode standard. If their textboxes blow up on account of stray unicode characters, then their software is crap to begin with. That isn't bloatware, that is bad design.

Bloatware is that desire to turn the web browser into a mail client, text editor, HTML IDE, chat client, music player, video editor, and all-around operating system. Giving full support to standard character sets is well within the core feature set of a program whose purpose is to connect to a site and display text and pictures.

I assume that you also believe the Wingding fonts were the biggest fundamental design flaw with Windows?

Re:Bloat

[Celarent Darii]

You perhaps know that one of the reasons slashdot itself (one of the major tech sites on the internet) doesn't support unicode fully is not only due to the laziness of the developers. Gmail until recently also had difficulties. The DNS system as well has all sorts of troubles with the Russian 'a' and the ASCII 'a'. Just selecting through several pages of memory to draw the right symbol is not going to happen without some cost.

"Displaying text and pictures" is not so simple as it may sound. Do you remember the JPEG flaw that was used as an exploit in Internet Explorer?

I'm not against supporting all sorts of character sets, but we can't imagine that it doesn't come without a price and potentially with several possible dangers.

IF Wingdings fonts makes my computer run as slow as molasses and weakens its security, then it is simply a flaw and not a feature. If our beloved web browser programmers however spend more time on implementing emoj than web standards, we have a problem. If they can get it to work without destroying fundamental functionality, I don't really care.

Apple stagnating again

[DJCouchyCouch]

Let's face it. Apple, known to all as a true innovator, is being taken over with stagnation. Once again, without Steve Jobs as a strong leader, it has rested on its laurels to let competitors overtake it. Google, which was lagging behind in important international emoji support in Chrome, was able to finally catch up to Apple, but only because of the latter's sitting on its hands. To Apple's fans, it's another slap in the face of lagging behind. Look, Google is now the true leader in emoji support and most analysis expect Apple to continue its downward slide towards oblivion. Expect Apple stock do drop by 50% over the next few days.

Re:what is emoji? summary + article doesn't say

[guruevi]

They're smileys. You know, the ;-) and :-D will get converted in one of those yellow characters if you form it in this particular way: :bowtie:

How Writers Expressed Emotions

[sudon't]

One wonders how, for thousands of years, writers managed to convey the tone of their writing without emoticons. Have we become worse writers, or denser readers? It's a form of laziness, isn't it?

Re:How Writers Expressed Emotions

[jeremyp]

Well most writers were always unable to convey the tone of their writing. Generally speaking, most of us only read the best writing from ages ago. Back in the 20th century, pretty much everything I read was written by people I knew personally or people who were good enough writers to get published in books and newspapers and magazines.

Now, Twitter is spammed relentlessly by the illiterate arseholes who were always there but couldn't get published in the past.

Re:This article typifies the decline of Slashdot

[sudon't]

Why are you typing useless, anonymous, comments? Don't you realize the problems of the World haven't yet been fixed?