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Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

geyer.dev

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Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#211

Post by makeitdouble »

jim-jim-jim wrote: post #165
lmm wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "actually in control" mean? When the IRA set up a checkpoint in Rosslea, should that have moved the border on the map? When there are disputes over uninhabited islands, do you want it to show whoever visited first? Obviously these are small examples, but the same issues apply to full-scale civil wars. You'd also be essentially legitimising the right of conquest if as soon as country A invades country B you…

> You'd also be essentially legitimising the right of conquest Documenting reality doesn't endorse what happened. Istanbul was Constantinople. Shit happens. If I'm travelling, I'd much rather the flags and borders reflect the situation on the ground instead of making meaningless humanitarian gestures.

> Documenting reality

The issue is reality not being settled or agreed upon. For disputed territories there is effectively two realities both officially backed by sovereign countries.

You can come up with some arbitrary criteria to split the difference, but your reality would break when you effectively set foot in a spot that works under the competing assumption.

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#212

Post by Symbiote »

zinekeller wrote: post #179
fsckboy wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

saying "it's North Korea" does not make a case that it's North Korea (especially when I acknowledged these disputes are all around the world, indicating that I understood that already). Fail.

There are ROK (South Korea) law s banning the display of DPRK (North Korea) imagery (and more), including the DPRK flag. Microsoft considers the SK market important enough that it has a separate version of Windows (the KN subvariant), so it's not really far-fetched that this is a consideration too.

The ban on "display" of the DPRK flag means flying the flag in public or on a building, it doesn't mean viewing the file on a computer.

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#213

Post by DiggyJohnson »

scrollaway wrote: post #193
DiggyJohnson wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair alternative, but would this not be much less recognizable on the page to a non-native speaker of the default language? What if you have so many locales that a menu or drop down is required? This does not seem to me like it’s a better solution, it just has different downsides.

Depends the kind of website you are looking at. But yes, my personal preference is to use the translation icon (it looks similar to the one used for Google and Apple translate apps), and next to it, the currently selected iso code. Then in the dropdown, as a list, what I mentioned above.

Thanks for the explanation. The translation icon is one of those things I didn't realize I was already familiar with.

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#214

Post by jeroenhd »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #15
fweimer wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They removed country borders from the time zone selection in a Windows 95 update: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42... In Bing Maps, I expect them change country borders based on localization settings, but that was probably too onerous to implement and test in the Windows 95 days.

I remember when this happened, which I guess makes me very old. They didn't actually remove the map - they just removed any functionality it had. So the time set window is massive for no reason, it contains this huge world map bitmap that no longer does anything.

They eventually did remove part of the map: because of politics and timing, Poland was accidentally removed despite the map time zone picker no longer working, because the dedicated Polish timezone the green pixels were attached to were removed.

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#215

Post by makeitdouble »

paulgb wrote: post #14
B-Con wrote: post #4

Presumably this is a big company problem of playing politics safely: They didn't want to take a position on the N country disputes out there by deciding which country code gets which flag and furthermore don't want to acknowledge which country politics are even disputed and so don't support the rest.

Microsoft has at least one maps product (Bing Maps), and at one time had an encyclopedia with an atlas. You’d think they’d have a way of dealing with disputed territory.

Getting out of these issues as fast as they can could be the learning they got from these products.

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#216

Post by croisillon »

psychoslave wrote: post #70

The main issue I have with these flags is that they are more often than not used to indicate language, not country. But many countries have more than one official language and many languages are official language of more than one country. Not many languages have some official flags though. There is one for Esperanto and Francophonie for example. But while anyone speaking Esperanto will certainly recognize the green f…

i wish there was a unicode version of that thing 文A Wikipedia does for language switch

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#217

Post by est »

culi wrote: post #122
psychoslave wrote: post #70

The main issue I have with these flags is that they are more often than not used to indicate language, not country. But many countries have more than one official language and many languages are official language of more than one country. Not many languages have some official flags though. There is one for Esperanto and Francophonie for example. But while anyone speaking Esperanto will certainly recognize the green f…

Yup. The top 7 most spoken languages in India are in the top 30 worldwide. And the top 3 in China are in the top 10 worldwide if you split up Cantonese (which is mutually unintelligible from most Mandarin languoids)

sorry but there's no "Cantonese text", both Cantonese and Mandarin are written in Chinese.

It's like Java and Scala both compiles to JVM bytecode.

(yes I am aware hk people chose to write 粤语白字 in a particular way, because the orthography movement failed in the 70s)

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#218

Post by est »

Arbortheus wrote: post #3

Dumb decision from Microsoft. Will they remove country borders from Bing Maps because they might be considered political too?

In case you aren't aware, the "Gulf of Mexico" thing just happenned few days ago.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/01/28/gulf-mexico-g...

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#219

Post by makeitdouble »

yieldcrv wrote: post #157

> Can you imagine if, gasp , your computer could render a Taiwanese or Palestinian flag? The horror! Just playing devil’s advocate but I kind of get it If there was a separatist region you felt wasn’t legitimate or entirely delusional in both their existence and their aims, and third parties started giving them legitimacy with flags that your former neighbor made up at night, you would be like “cmon, wtf, cut that ou…

To note, the original emoji set was half funky and didn't pretend to represent anything political. That's where French oversea depts flags ( Martinique, St Pierre et Miquelon etc.) or UK flags (england, wales etc) are included even as those are not countries.

I think we're taking emoji way too seriously in average. Perhaps we should start including popular flag propositions that got shut down by the officials (like the Australian flag redesign contest) just to make it clear that emoji are just words and nothing more.

Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

#220

Post by dkdbejwi383 »

bawolff wrote: post #77
troad wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel obliged to point out that while flags do not represent languages perfectly, there is no good, user-facing symbolic alternative for languages. No, people don't know the ISO codes for their languages. No, you can't use the full name, since some languages have very long names. No, a single 'languages' icon isn't enough, you often need to symbolically represent individual languages. For the most common languages,…

> No, people don't know the ISO codes for their languages. As a canadian, i know what EN means. However when sites use flags its a mystery. Am i supposed to pick canada or is that "canadian french". Maybe im supposed to pick the american flag, but eww feel like a traitor and i want the u's in my words. Is it the british flag? I have no idea. Flags for languages are stupid. Not to mention for all those languages that…

> Is it the british flag?

obviously the British flag is for the least controversial option, Ulster Scots.

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