It's probably down to browser/OS support and the increasing importance of user-generated content on the web. Windows only got Unicode support by default on the

It's probably down to browser/OS support and the increasing importance of user-generated content on the web. Windows only got Unicode support by default on the consumer side with Windows XP which launched in 2001. Mac OS X was also released in 2001 and had Unicode support from the start (unlike Classic Mac OS which had it bolted on with poor app support). Similarly, according to this old blog post I dug up[1] Internet Explorer only got good Unicode support with 5.5 in 2000, and Netscape never had good Unicode support. Firefox, which had Unicode support from the start, was released around 2002. By 2006, which is clearly an inflection point on that graph, browsers and OSes with poor Unicode support were highly obsolete and global social media platforms like Myspace, Facebook, and Twitter, which needed Unicode to enable sharing of user posts between users writing in different languages, were on the ascendance. [1] https://www.worldtimzone.com/2002/09/24/ https://www.worldtimzone.com/2002/09/24/