Bugzilla

To summarize, the glyphs in the Wingdings font are encoded in the Unicode private use area at codepoints U+F020 .. U+F0FF. So by using those codepoints, they can be displayed just fine in Firefox (or in other browsers).

I guess Chrome *also* supports rendering them using the (extended-)ASCII codepoints that were used in pre-Unicode software, where "symbol fonts" just re-used the limited range of 8-bit codepoints and assigned arbitrary glyphs to them. This is of course terrible for interoperability. In a world of Unicode-based software, it should be universal and unambiguous that U+0041 is *always* a LATIN LETTER CAPITAL A; it is *never* a hand with two fingers raised.

(There is actually a standardized Unicode codepoint for VICTORY HAND at U+270C. However, Wingdings doesn't encode its glyph there, so to display its VICTORY HAND symbol you'd need to use something like  -- which is pretty sad from an interoperability perspective.)

To summarize, the glyphs in the Wingdings font are encoded in the Unicode private use area at codepoints U+F020 .. U+F0FF. So by using those codepoints, they can be displayed just fine in Firefox (or in other browsers).

I guess Chrome *also* supports rendering them using the (extended-)ASCII codepoints that were used in pre-Unicode software, where "symbol fonts" just re-used the limited range of 8-bit codepoints and assigned arbitrary glyphs to them. This is of course terrible for interoperability. In a world of Unicode-based software, it should be universal and unambiguous that U+0041 is *always* a LATIN LETTER CAPITAL A; it is *never* a hand with two fingers raised.

(There is actually a standardized Unicode codepoint for VICTORY HAND at U+270C. However, Wingdings doesn't encode its glyph there, so to display its VICTORY HAND symbol you'd need to use something like `` -- which is pretty sad from an interoperability perspective.)