Twitter’s new emoji support brings tacos, burritos, and racial diversity
The latest version of the Unicode standard adds dozens more characters, including Taco, Burrito, Unicorn Face, and Sign of the Horns.
Unicode 8 also brings an eye toward diversity, as users are able to modify the skin tone of hands and faces. The new standard includes several new places of worship as well, including Synagogue and Mosque, and allows family emojis to include same-sex couples.
Still, most web browsers aren’t fully up to date on their emoji support, which means it’s up to individual websites to make sure they’re displayed properly. Twitter itself has done a lot of work in this area, having open-sourced its own emoji library for websites to use, but until now its own website hasn’t offered the latest and greatest.
Unfortunately, TweetDeck—Twitter’s alternative web client for power users—hasn’t made the leap yet. Viewing Twitter’s announcement tweets through TweetDeck shows a serious lack of skin tones and Mexican food items.
Why this matters: This isn’t a problem that mobile users have, as the full array of Unicode 8.0 emojis are already supported in iOS 9.1 and Android 6.0.1. Still, it’s nice to see Twitter add these emojis to its desktop site, bringing some consistency to what can be a fragmented system.