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Comment by moron4hire | Hacker News Reader

:( the cat glyph worked in Chrome on my phone but not on my desktop.

Oh, it's supposed to be a cat glyph?

Chrome on OS X 10.8 shows me a square, and so I assumed that the joke is that it represents Schrödinger's box -- you know, where he keeps the cat which may or may not be dead.

Heh, that's actually kind of a neat, serendipitous, not-really-neat-because-this-shit-should-fucking-work-by-now-it's-2013-fer-chrissakes fallback.

To be fair, Emoji are a fairly recent addition to Unicode and they're not really ubiquitous outside of mobile phones (they started as a formal encoding of various pictograms used predominantly by Japanese carriers for SMS). No OS supplies enough fonts to cover 100 % of Unicode out of the box.

That being said, Emoji seem to work at least on Mac OS X (current) and Windows 8. Alas, Chrome doesn't render them within a page (but in the tab/title bar, maybe because the OS' rendering takes over there). Firefox and IE show them both, apparently (presumably because both are DirectWrite-based by now).

Firefox on Linux (where I assume DirectWrite isn't used) also displays it fine.

mine only showed up as a box until i observed it.

My OS X 10.7.5 Chrome shows a cat glyph in the title in the tab bar, but a square in the actual text. Quite weird.

Windows 8 Chrome does the same, here.

Different fonts, right?

Odd, considering it works fine on Firefox on OS X 10.8 for me. Perhaps your Chrome install is broken? Or does Chrome simply not support the cat symbol?

Chrome doesn't render emoji. I believe it uses it's own font rendering engine or something along those lines. OSX does render emoji so Firefox shows the character (which I believe relies on the OS font rendering engine).

See http://apple.stackexchange.com/questions/41228/why-do-emoji-... for more details.

Also, I am not an expert about this so I could be wrong about the details.

http://imgur.com/dvHjJoa

Granted, this is on Linux, but I think it's only a matter of whether or not your font has glyphs for the emoji characters -- correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't see a technical reason to treat emoji differently from any other Unicode character.

The technical reason is that when a font is drawn, a few coherent chunks of Unicode are included and the rest are left out.

No font can have complete Unicode support (OpenType supports 65k glyphs while Unicode has a little over 100k code points). So font rendering and layout engines usually pick different fonts for different scripts. The reason why Chrome on OS X (and Windows 8) displays Emoji in the title bar but not in the page is likely that the OS knows how to render emoji (in OS X's case even as coloured bitmaps) while Chrome's rendering engine does not. In both cases the emoji are very likely not part of the font (you ship one font that contains the icons and while rendering you can pick them from that font, instead of having to ship every font with those glyphs).

Maybe it's some special "Schrödinger's cat" glyph. My Firefox displays it properly on HN, but when I follow the link the tab bar shows a square. And title bar a cat.

That's the wavefunction collapsing.

I have yet to see the cat glyph in the title (firefox, chrome, or safari) is it 1F63B in http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1F600.pdf ?

Edit: changed glyph based on someone mentioning it had heart-shaped eyes

Yes it is 1F63B, to confirm use iconv,xxd and copy+paste the character from the title:

  $ iconv --to-code UTF-32BE|xxd
  😻
  0000000: 0001 f63b 0000 000a                      ...;....

It's a known issue in Chrome: https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=62435

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