Consider changing emoji font as Twemoji's future is uncertain
Categories
(Core :: Layout: Text and Fonts, enhancement)
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(Reporter: Raddaya45, Unassigned, NeedInfo)
Details
User Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64; rv:109.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/111.0
Steps to reproduce:
Firefox uses Twemoji Mozilla adapted from Twemoji for its emoji font. However, ever since Twitter's takeover, the future of Twemoji is very uncertain: https://github.com/twitter/twemoji/issues/570#issuecomment-1352347394
Due to this, Firefox still does not supported Unicode 15.0 emojis, because development of Twemoji has almost stalled.
There are many other options for default emoji fonts. Noto Color Emoji is the most well-known one. As another example, one of the Twemoji contributors has made her own fork as well: https://github.com/jdecked/twemoji
Firefox may need to consider a change to maintain long term emoji compatibility.
[A small note: I am a first time Bugzilla contributor. On top of that, this is not exactly a bug in the typical sense. I realise it is extremely likely I've made a mistake in this report, so please let me know how I can fix this or if I should submit this somewhere else. Thank you!]
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Comment 1•2 years ago
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The Bugbug bot thinks this bug should belong to the 'Core::Layout: Text and Fonts' component, and is moving the bug to that component. Please correct in case you think the bot is wrong.
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Comment 2•1 year ago
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I don't think Firefox should bundle an Emoji font at all. Using the system one should be fine. This is actually what is done for non-emoji fonts already.
(In reply to Hugo Osvaldo Barrera from comment #2)
I don't think Firefox should bundle an Emoji font at all. Using the system one should be fine. This is actually what is done for non-emoji fonts already.
While I understand that point of view, this would negatively impact many users as system fonts are frequently very out of date in regards to emojis. Would that really be a worthwhile tradeoffs when there are so many open-source emoji fonts available?
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Comment 4•1 year ago
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this would negatively impact many users as system fonts are frequently very out of date in regards to emojis.
The same argument can be made for every single desktop application to bundle their own copy of emoji fonts: "what if the system one is out of date". I don't think that any other browser or desktop appliation should bundle their own fonts "just in case the system one is out of date".
Having an updated and sane environment is a requirement for Firefox to work properly; it shouldn't try and work around a broken setup to this extreme.
system fonts are frequently very out of date in regards to emojis.
Where does this "fact" come from? I can imagine that on a system with outdated font packages, Firefox is also very likely to be out of date anyway.
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Comment 5•1 year ago
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I think the more pressing problem is missing flag emoji on Windows. Firefox could just subset an emoji font to contain only the flag emoji and then use the system font for everything else.
"system fonts are frequently very out of date in regards to emojis" - I don't agree with that. Windows 11 has been somewhat slow in updating with the newest emoji but all current major platforms do get updated with the latest emoji eventually.
Firefox is the only browser that bundles an emoji font.
• "I can imagine that on a system with outdated font packages, Firefox is also very likely to be out of date anyway."
That's outright wrong. As far as Wikipedia's list of Firefox releases is concerned, vanilla Windows 10 is still able to install Firefox 123 stable, the newest stable version as of when I wrote this post. And Windows 10 vanilla's native emote selection was roughly equivalent to Emoji 1.0.
• "I think the more pressing problem is missing flag emoji on Windows."
As far as Android goes, Emoji 15.0 (and beyond) remains a major concern. I have a phone with Android 10, which can safely be assumed to not get any emojis added in system updates anytime (and therefore have emoji fonts far behind 14.0, let alone 15.0), so I'm 100% dependent on Firefox to show emotes on typical websites, which isn't going all that well on e.g. Tumblr. Note that the grey box in my reply in the below screenshot was supposed to be the Light Blue Heart emote, introduced in Emoji 15.0.
How about choosing emoji font like choosing sans-serif, serif and monospace fonts?
I don't think it's a good idea for a browser (or any other softwares) to bundle an emoji font, because it will only lead to inconsistent fonts between different programs.
(In reply to tjw123hh from comment #7)
How about choosing emoji font like choosing
sans-serif,serifandmonospacefonts?
I don't think it's a good idea for a browser (or any other softwares) to bundle an emoji font, because it will only lead to inconsistent fonts between different programs.
The completeness of system fonts far exceeds what a browser should consider, in my opinion.
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Comment 9•29 days ago
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I maintain an emoji picker web component that uses built-in fonts. From my POV, it would be great if Firefox updated to a font that supports Unicode 15.1, e.g. the fork of Twemoji which is maintained by a former Twemoji author and has the same license.
In my emoji picker, I've historically used the Twemoji Mozilla font where available, since it tended to provide better support than the built-in OS font (Segoe on Windows, Apple on MacOS, Noto on Linux, etc.). That's less and less the case, though, which is causing issues such as mixed fonts (e.g. "shaking head" 🫨 being rendered in the OS font whereas "face in the clouds" 😶🌫️ is rendered in Twemoji), or characters being rendered with two glyphs (e.g. "head shaking horizontally" 🙂↔️ being rendered as two separate characters: "slightly smiling face" 🙂 and "left-right arrow" ↔️.
Incidentally, I see this same issue on other websites that use native fonts, such as GitHub or this very Bugzilla interface. If you're viewing this post on Firefox 129 in a system with up-to-date fonts (e.g. Ubuntu 24.04 in my case), you'll see what I'm describing. 🙂
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