The continuing tragedy of emoji on the web

• Firefox bundles their own emoji font (great!), but unfortunately, thanks to turmoil at Twitter/X, their bet on Twemoji has not shaken out too well, and they are two years behind the latest Unicode standard.
• Windows 10 users (i.e. 64% of Windows as a whole) are stuck five years behind in emoji versions, and even Windows 11 is still not showing flag emoji, which Microsoft excludes for some mysterious reason. (Geopolitical skittishness? Disregard for sports fans?)
• Safari has the same fragmentation problem, with multiple users stuck on old versions of iOS, and thus old emoji fonts. For example, some 3.75% of iOS users are still on iOS 15, with only 2022-era emoji. [2]

As a result, every website on the planet that cares about having a consistent emoji experience has to bundle their own font or spritesheet, wasting untold megabytes for something that’s been standardized like clockwork by the Unicode Consortium for 15 years.

Source: The continuing tragedy of emoji on the web | Read the Tea Leaves