Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows
1–10 of 328 posts
Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows
#2Yep, can confirm that emoji flags are evil. We had same problem. Windows users reported missing flags and few google searches away we found out that emoji flags are not supported.
Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows
#3Dumb decision from Microsoft. Will they remove country borders from Bing Maps because they might be considered political too?
Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows
#4Presumably 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.
Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows
#5[dead]
Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows
#6Dumb decision from Microsoft. Will they remove country borders from Bing Maps because they might be considered political too?
You're not too far from the truth -- most mapping services render political boundaries differently based on where you're accessing the site from.
Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows
#7> My approach was to draw an American flag emoji and then look at the pixels to see if any of them contained a non-grayscale color. This works because the Windows fallback emoji is just black/white text
This is the kind of thing that works great for a while, and then an OS update flips the table on how RGB subpixel antialiasing works for the subset of your users with a certain type of display, leading to a false positive all of a sudden.
Chrome could at least expose support like other feature detection APIs, even if they don't go so far as to provide the flags, to avoid this ridiculous heuristic approach.
Aside: my personal belief is that the political charge here lies with Unicode having codepoints for such countries, and downstream dependents of Unicode can readily point the finger. Displaying monochrome text of a country abbreviation instead of a flag doesn't seem like it would appease those who don't want the country acknowledged, anyhow; a "missing glyph" type of thing would come closer.
Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows
#8Dumb decision from Microsoft. Will they remove country borders from Bing Maps because they might be considered political too?
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.
Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows
#9Dumb decision from Microsoft. Will they remove country borders from Bing Maps because they might be considered political too?
Basically any large platform that renders map data realizes pretty quickly that you have to adjust it country by country to accommodate everyone’s irredentist claims and naming disputes. I suppose there’s no reason they couldn’t ship different system fonts to different countries, but that introduces a lot of annoyance and room for error for a somewhat marginal use case.
Re: Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows
#10Since the article mentions using flags to represent languages, I feel obliged to point out that flags do not represent languages, so probably don’t use flags to represent languages.