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

Posted by timothy on from the luckily-only-words-here dept.

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.

19 of 104 comments (clear)

  1. This should really be two articles... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    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.

    1. Re:This should really be two articles... by stephanruby · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

    2. Re: This should really be two articles... by stephanruby · · Score: 2

      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.

  2. Who gives a fuck by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re: Who gives a fuck by wasabioss · · Score: 2

      I doðY(TM)

    2. Re: Who gives a fuck by tysonedwards · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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?

      --
      Thirty four characters live here.
    3. Re:Who gives a fuck by blang · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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?

      --
      -- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
    4. Re:Who gives a fuck by Mr_Silver · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
  3. Great, make the Internet even more infantile by marienf · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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..

    1. Re:Great, make the Internet even more infantile by beakerMeep · · Score: 4, Funny

      You >:-o bro?

      --
      meep
    2. Re:Great, make the Internet even more infantile by marienf · · Score: 4, Insightful

      > 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

    3. Re:Great, make the Internet even more infantile by AmiMoJo · · Score: 2

      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.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
  4. Fuck Emoji by Maow · · Score: 2

    Subject says it all.

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

    1. Re:Fuck Emoji by blang · · Score: 2

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

      --
      -- Another senseless waste of fine bytes.
    2. Re:Fuck Emoji by Maow · · Score: 2

      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.

  5. agree with harmful by marienf · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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..

  6. What about battery life by thetoadwarrior · · Score: 2

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

  7. Bloat by Celarent+Darii · · Score: 2

    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.

    1. Re:Bloat by Celarent+Darii · · Score: 2

      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.