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.

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

[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

[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

[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.

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

[beakerMeep]

You >:-o bro?

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

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..