Why don't country flag emojis display properly on Windows?
After receiving a report that 'flag emojis are displayed as simple characters,' developer Ryan Geyer published a report that determined why this was happening.
The dumb reason why flag emojis aren't working on your site in Chrome on Windows
When Geyer first received reports of 'country flag emojis not appearing,' he suspected that the problem was caused by people using incredibly old machines or outdated web browsers that didn't support emojis. In fact, the problematic environment was a Windows machine running the latest version of Chrome.
After getting no solution from ChatGPT, Geyer decided to dig deeper and discovered that the problem was caused by Windows not including flag emojis in its system fonts.
So, the question now becomes, 'Why doesn't Microsoft include flag emojis in the Windows system fonts?' Geyer speculates that it's because 'politically, they don't want it to be perceived as an acknowledgement of the existence of certain 'countries.''
It has been pointed out for some time that the emoji font for Windows 10
Using emojis on the web
https://fullystacked.net/using-emoji-on-the-web/
Since Firefox can do it on its own, it should be possible to do the same thing with Chrome. However, when Geyer investigated, when the issue of flag emojis not being displayed was brought up in a forum in May 2021, a Google employee responded that 'there are currently no plans to release our own emoji font with the web browser.'
Add support for country flag emojis [40766658] - Chromium
https://issues.chromium.org/issues/40766658
Geyer offers two solutions if you insist on using flag emojis:
The first is to replace them with hard-coded SVG icons, which might be fine if your needs are simple, but can get tedious when doing more dynamic work where you don't know which flags you need until runtime.
Another way is to use a custom font that includes flag emojis with a polyfill . For example, it is possible to call only the subset of the 'Twemoji' font used to display flag emojis in Firefox that covers the flag parts. However, this requires downloading the entire font file, which is 1.4 MB.
Geyer added, 'The biggest lesson is that flag emojis should not be an integral part of site design. If you break it, you will suffer. In an ideal world, this would be fixed at some point, but after years of no movement, I'm not hopeful anymore. Thanks, Microsoft 🇹🇼.'
By the way, the following image shows what the flag emojis look like. The top row shows how they look on a smartphone or Windows Firefox, and the bottom row shows how they look on a Windows browser other than Firefox.
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in Note, Posted by logc_nt