1548043 - In recommendations, the "Tech 🖥" section depends on system-font support for the U+1F5A5 DESKTOP COMPUTER emoji

Status: VERIFIED FIXED

(Firefox :: New Tab Page, defect, P1)

Description

[Jeff Walden [:Waldo]]

Attachment: Screenshot of missing emoji

The new-tab page in nightlies recently picked up sectioned recommendation support. Each section is a name (e.g. "Tech") and an emoji ("🖥"). This is cool and all -- but this means the headings' font must support that emoji.

Unfortunately, the "Tech" associated emoji, U+1F5A5 DESKTOP COMPUTER, doesn't seem to be guaranteed in the relevant font. On a largely basic Fedora 28, it instead shows up as some sort of missing-glyph thing. (Or maybe there's actually a glyph there? Usually missing glyphs get box-of-hexadecimal treatment, not sure what's up there.) Maybe the Mozilla emoji-font we ship needs to have support added for this...or something.

One possible hackaround, if font support isn't quite there and can't readily be added, might be to switch to U+1F4F1 MOBILE PHONE. That arguably has the virtue of being more "modern" than a desktop, and it displays for me so support for it is better at least some places.

Comment 1

[Wolasi :wolasi]

Per emojipedia Desktop Computer was approved as part of Unicode 7.0 in 2014 and added to Emoji 1.0 in 2015.
https://emojipedia.org/desktop-computer/

Comment 2

[Jeff Walden [:Waldo]]

FWIW latest Fedora (30 -- 28 from comment 0 is now unsupported) still doesn't support this emoji.

Comment 3

[Gavin Suntop [:gvn] (they/them)]

Looks like U+1F4F1 MOBILE PHONE was approved in Unicode 6.0. I'm not sure if that means anything in 6.0 is fair game since there are so many Linux distros.

FWIW the font-family stack for those headers is -apple-system, BlinkMacSystemFont, 'Segoe UI', 'Ubuntu', 'Helvetica Neue', sans-serif.

As fonts have varying support for emoji I'm not sure if there's any 100% bulletproof choice. We may want to consider embedding SVG glyphs to ensure compatibility. That will, however, require an update to our layout schema.

It seems like the best short term solution is to go with the mobile phone emoji as suggested, or find something else from Unicode 6 or lower.

Wolasi, thoughts?

Comment 4

[Gavin Suntop [:gvn] (they/them)]

Another option from Unicode 6: https://emojipedia.org/personal-computer/

💻

Comment 5

[Wolasi :wolasi]

Personal Computer seems like a decent compromise

Comment 6

[Jeff Walden [:Waldo]]

IRC suggests that font-family: "Twemoji Mozilla" may be adequate to ensure display happens, using the internal emoji-support font we ship with.

Comment 7

[Gavin Suntop [:gvn] (they/them)]

If we use that font-family it should just be applied to the emoji, which will need a schema change. That seems like the better long term solution, but as a speedier interim solution we can just switch to the personal computer emoji for wider support.

Comment 8

[Gavin Suntop [:gvn] (they/them)]

I can update the emoji in the shipped/bundled layout, and then I believe Mathijs can update it in the remote layouts.

Comment 9

[GitHub Bugzilla PR Linker]

Attachment: Link to GitHub pull-request: https://github.com/mozilla/activity-stream/pull/5075

Comment 10

[Gavin Suntop [:gvn] (they/them)]

Attachment: With new "Personal Computer" emoji on linux

Comment 11

[Ed Lee :Mardak]

https://hg.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/rev/07bb612a30b0

Comment 12

[Marius Coman [:mcoman], Ecosystem QA]

I have verified that this issue is no longer reproducible with the latest Firefox Nightly (69.0a1 Build ID - 20190604034844) installed, on Windows 10 x64, Arch Linux and Mac 10.14.5. Now, the "Tech" section's icon is changed.