18 ms·

Some flag emojis aren’t working on Chrome on Windows

288 points by gyanreyer 2y ago

sandruso 2y ago
Yep, 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.
Arbortheus 2y ago
Dumb decision from Microsoft. Will they remove country borders from Bing Maps because they might be considered political too?
- jey 2y ago
  You're not too far from the truth -- most mapping services render political boundaries differently based on where you're accessing the site from.
  - strictnein 2y ago
    The Kashmir region north of New Delhi is an interesting example. Even in the US, Google basically says you're on your own, but here's a collection of dotted lines that may or may not be the actual borders.
  - int_19h 2y ago
    Or just refuse to commit. E.g. Google Maps, to this day, will not show the country for any Crimean city when you click on it to bring up its info panel. If you do this with e.g. Kherson, you get "Kherson, Kherson Oblast, Ukraine". But if you do it with Sevastopol, you only get the city name, not the region & country. It also shows dotted borders between Crimea and both Russia and Ukraine.
    - IshKebab 2y ago
      Well... that kind of makes sense no? What do you think it should say?
      - LAC-Tech 2y ago
        I want maps to show reality. Not who they *think* should be in control of Taiwan or Transnistria, but who actually is.
        lmm 2y ago
        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 move the border on the map. That would be pretty counterproductive.
        jim-jim-jim 2y ago
        > 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.
        lmm 2y ago
        It's the opposite of meaningless. Delegitimising wars of conquest massively reduced them and was a big part of why the 20th century was so much more peaceful on the whole (yes, even with the giant wars that did take place) than those before it.
        IshKebab 2y ago
        That's a very big and dubious claim! I'd like to see some evidence for that.
    - andix 2y ago
      Isn’t Google Maps blocked in Russia anyway? Crimea is a different story, as many countries recognize it to be in some kind of limbo and treat it as neither Russian nor Ukrainian. I think Yandex (Russian Google) removed borders completely from their maps. Also because it’s impossible to figure out where the Russian government would like them to be. Might change on a daily basis. Google maps added the „gulf of America“ to their US version, because anywhere else it’s still the Gulf of Mexico (even in iOS autocorrect, it changed it correctly to uppercase).
      - riffraff 2y ago
        the "gulf of america" thing is Google pandering to Trump, they originally had a policy of only using the popular name in a given locale. > if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage. https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2008/04/how-google-determines-names-for-bodies.html https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2008/04/how-google-deter...
        neuronexmachina 2y ago
        I think they mostly started with geolocation-dependent names in the early 2010s, e.g. Kashmir and Palestine.
        riffraff 2y ago
        that's different, they had location-dependent names at the time of this article too, the issue is specifically about the fact that even if you have location-dependent names you'd use the name that is commonly used in that location, not an arbitrary regulation name.
        owlninja 2y ago
        I thought they used the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) from the USGS. If this buffoonery does pass, it will reflect in the government official data source - and thus on Google maps?
- fweimer 2y ago
  They removed country borders from the time zone selection in a Windows 95 update: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42823 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.
  - LeoPanthera 2y ago
    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.
    - Kwpolska 2y ago
      Almost nothing, it scrolls horizontally to show the selected time zone in the middle.
      - canucker2016 2y ago
        Think of the dev/test/PM people who worked on this feature. It's not a standard Windows control, so there had to be lots of work to get the timezone boundaries, map to values usable for their world map bitmap, iterate a bit on the behaviour for when the user clicks at x,y on the map, et. al. The elation of shipping the minor feature, followed a few months later, with the realization that most of that work is going to be neutered.
    - jeroenhd 2y ago
      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.
- SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
  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.
- andix 2y ago
  It’s the reality of doing business all around the world. Either you chose sides, create different releases of software for some countries (deployment nightmare), or just remove such „sensitive“ features.
  - immibis 2y ago
    BTW the USA is now one of these "sensitive countries" where apps have to lie to legally do business. Just like Chinese users see Taiwan labeled as China, American users see (or will soon see) the Gulf of Mexico labeled as the Gulf of America.
    - SllX 2y ago
      Two things: 1) Don’t lie. Apps don’t have to “lie” to do business in America. If someone labels the Gulf as the “Gulf of Mexico”, there’s not really a goddamn thing the Federal Government can do about it except throw a shit fit. The fullest extent that they can enforce this is on contractors making products and services specifically for the Federal Government’s and Military’s own use. 2) Maps apps are probably going to relabel it as the Gulf of America anyway within America, and it’s not exactly a lie. Barring any issue with Congress, if there’s some statute buried somewhere that legally enforces the name of the Gulf to be the Gulf of Mexico, it isn’t exactly a lie if the President exercising the authority of the Office of the President renames a geographical feature that’s at least partly touched by the US. There’s a lot of geographical features that have different names either in different languages, different locales or both, and it’s fully within the Executive branch’s purview to name them. They do so all the time, although typically for the more obscure things nowadays since for anything too prominent, the name was decided long ago. Maps apps can set their own policy on this, but generally the easiest course of action is to defer to governing authorities.
      - nottorp 2y ago
        So it's only bad when the Chinese or Russians do it? :)
        2y ago
- wodenokoto 2y ago
  I believe google maps have already implemented the Gulf of America for US users.
- est 2y ago
  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-google-maps-america-mckinley-denali/77990503007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/01/28/gulf-mexico-g...
draw_down 2y ago
[dead]
B-Con 2y ago
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.
- paulgb 2y ago
  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.
  - CamouflagedKiwi 2y ago
    I'm sure they do have a way of dealing with it in Bing Maps - I assume they can display borders differently depending on the country of origin (I think that's the common approach), but that has zero technological overlap with the presence or absence of Unicode flag codepoints in a system-level font.
  - makeitdouble 2y ago
    Getting out of these issues as fast as they can could be the learning they got from these products.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > They didn't want to take a position on the N country disputes out there by deciding which country code gets which flag Why not simply collect all the prevalent "stances" on the disputed topics, and give the user to choose on each stance individually (or for a better user experience: create some presets of "stances that often occur together", which the user can use to activate multiple stances at once).
  - mschuster91 2y ago
    Some of the target countries have laws on the books with teeth regarding their individual disputes.
hunter2_ 2y ago
> 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.
- scrollaway 2y ago
  Unicode doesn’t have codepoints for any of these. Unicode has defined a singular generic way to transform iso country codes (not even — just two of any characters), and says it’s how you do flags.
  - rozab 2y ago
    No, unicode define the region subtags here https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/blob/maint/maint-41/common/validity/region.xml https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/blob/maint/maint-41/comm... You can see the country names alongside the codepoints here, ctrl+f for 'taiwan' and 'palestinian territories' https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-sequences.txt https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-sequences.txt
    - dgfitz 2y ago
      I welcome the day I can identify my home as a territory and have it legally recognized. Who exactly decides this, in the actual code?
      - 2y ago
tobr 2y ago
Since 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.
- Y_Y 2y ago
  But flags almost sometimes map roughly to languages within my limited experience! For example there's only one kind of English and it belongs to the USA. Also Spanish, that must be USA too, even if some unimportant countries speak it. Brazil can have Portuguese because I don't know where Angola is. The Indian flag can represent Hindi, but also the 22 scheduled languages, but not the other official language because I already allocated it. This is going pretty well, but seems tedious, so for all other cases let's just merge ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 and ISO 639-1 as follows: SELECT c.code AS common_code, c.country_name, l.language_name FROM iso_3166 c INNER JOIN iso_639 l ON c.code = l.code; And if they don't speak Afrikaans in Afghanistan or Arabic in Argentina then you'll have to take it up with the International Organization for Standardization.
  - the_other 2y ago
    Nice. Even Japan (jp) and Japanese (ja) lose out with this.
  - toolslive 2y ago
    So - for English, I'll use the Jamaican flag. - for Russian, I'll use the flag of South Ossetia. - for German, I'll use the flag of Austria. - for French, I'll use the Malinese Flag. - for Dutch, I'll use flag of Suriname. just see how happy people are with this ;)
    - ahoka 2y ago
      No, for English you should obviously use the flag of the largest country that uses it as an official language: India.
      - 2y ago
kccqzy 2y ago
> 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 Wait. I thought Windows has ClearType which could render black text on white background using colors. And furthermore there is a wizard to allow users to adjust how much ClearType adjustment there is. This feels like a totally incorrect solution. And apparently starting from 2021 Microsoft Edge did in fact begin to use ClearText according to this article https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2021/06/02/improving-font-rendering-in-microsoft-edge/ https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2021/06/02/improving-fon... from Microsoft. So the author's approach would be broken in Microsoft Edge since 2021.
- tobr 2y ago
  The polyfill mentioned and linked in the article has a cleverer solution. It attempts to render the same flag emoji in two different text colors and checks if they end up being the same color or not (same color = probably a color glyph, ie an emoji). https://github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill/blob/527a3d121d2e198e733934a8b1007c819244e903/src/emoji.ts#L48 https://github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill/blob/5...
  - skrebbel 2y ago
    (I'm the author of the polyfill, though note that all this code is pieced together from existing other libs with irrelevant parts removed; none of the good ideas are mine) Just randomly sharing, the part of the trick I like the most is that it renders the emojis scaled down to a 1x1 canvas, so it renders just a single pixel. That makes checking stuff like "am i not accidentally reading in the transparent area of the glyph" and stuff like that no problem, because the whole emoji is blurred down to a single pixel. The author's example is a bit weird in this regard, it does the same trick (set the canvas width and height to 1), and then it still loops through all 1 pixels and discards any transparent ones.
- MatmaRex 2y ago
  You're right, but the author's approach still works by accident, because ClearType is disabled when drawing text to canvas. I am not sure why that's the case, but I would guess it's because the subpixel colors can only be computed correctly when the background color is known (and static), and with a canvas, the background can be drawn later or animated. ClearType is only enabled for normal text on the page, and many CSS properties incidentally disable it presumably for similar reasons (e.g. 'will-change: opacity;').
slig 2y ago
Why are emojis tied to a OS font? The only reason I can think of is another way to force people to upgrade their OS, for instance, on macOS, even if your version was still supported, you wouldn't get the new emojis until you upgraded.
- jagged-chisel 2y ago
  …or install a font with support
- cdrini 2y ago
  Hmm I'm a bit confused by your question. Emojis are a Unicode range, and the only way Unicode is displayed on a monitor is through -- a font. So just like with text, if a website doesn't load it's own font, the OS-level fonts are used. I'm not sure what the alternative would be.
  - slig 2y ago
    Sorry, I now see my question was poorly worded. I was ranting about OS vendors not updating emoji fonts on supported versions -- you have to upgrade to the latest major version to get new emojis. I ran into this issue twice when using an older, and supported, version of both macOS and Android.
    - kccqzy 2y ago
      It is definitely a strategy for Apple to increase uptake of their non x.0 releases.
danjl 2y ago
Does this problem disappear if you specify your own font for your site, like Roboto?
- TonyTrapp 2y ago
  If the font contains the missing emojis, sure. Emoji fonts tend to be huge though. The base Roboto font doesn't contain the emojis IIRC, there's a separate Roboto Emoji font for this reason (it's several dozen MBs).
- qingcharles 2y ago
  You can also do like a lot of major sites and just identify the codepoints and replace them with images as a kludge. I think Twitter does this since Elon thought the water gun emoji was too "woke".
  - gruez 2y ago
    >think Twitter does this since Elon thought the water gun emoji was too "woke". Funny you say that, considering it originally was an actual gun, then companies progressively changed it to a water gun until it was the defacto standard. I guess if something got changed for "woke" reasons, and it sticks around long enough, you can dunk on the guy changing it back for being "anti-woke"?
josephcsible 2y ago
I don't get why Google doesn't want to ship them with Chrome, since they're not taking any more of a political stance by doing so than they are by shipping them with Android.
- 0x073 2y ago
  Firefox has an custom cert management. Chrome relies on the os certs. I think that's the correct way how software should works.
  - ziddoap 2y ago
    Chrome runs a root program, and has for a few years. >Standardizing the set of CAs trusted by Chrome across platforms through the transition to the Chrome Root Store, coupled with a consistent certificate verification experience through the use of the Chrome Certificate Verifier, will result in more consistent user and developer experiences. https://blog.chromium.org/2022/09/announcing-launch-of-chrome-root-program.html https://blog.chromium.org/2022/09/announcing-launch-of-chrom...
- GuB-42 2y ago
  My idea is that an app should do its best to work with the OS and not override defaults, that includes system fonts. It is good for consistency, accessibility, etc... If Windows doesn't ship with flag emoji, or any character for that matter, that shouldn't be Chrome's problem. Android is an OS, Google is responsible of it, so they get to decide what goes in their fonts.
  - echoangle 2y ago
    By that argument, they shouldn't override the OS trust store either, but most browsers do. There's a compromise between consistency and user friendliness.
    - GuB-42 2y ago
      Chrome doesn't override the OS trust store, Firefox does.
fsckboy 2y ago
yes, we know, there are historical territorial disputes all over the world. But can somebody here make a case that this is not actually/solely to appease China (over Taiwan presumably)?
- mjr00 2y ago
  If the essence of your question is "are there US-aligned/non-China countries who would have issues about certain flags", the answer is yes. Good example: the flag for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, aka North Korea. The Western world acknowledges North Korea as a separate entity. South Korea does not and considers the North part of its territory. They wouldn't be too happy about a NK flag on their operating system giving legitimacy to the state.
  - fsckboy 2y ago
    no, (a) that's not the essence of my question and (b) I was not asking the essence of my question, I was asking literally my question. Microsoft would not respond to North Korea by deleting all the unicode flags all over the world, so while that might get you closer to the essence of your question, there's no point in me asking my question if you are just going to dodge it.
    - mjr00 2y ago
      Your question was > can somebody here make a case that this is not actually/solely to appease China (over Taiwan presumably)? I gave one (of many) examples where this would be relevant for a country other than China. If you don't think South Korea is politically important enough to matter, then use the Israel/Palestinian flag situation as something that certainly is. Or more simply: no, this is not just because of China and Taiwan.
      - fsckboy 2y ago
        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.
Jotalea 2y ago
> Out of desperation I asked ChatGPT. It was useless as usual. This is so real.
- sureIy 2y ago
  I hold the belief that if you ask it something that nobody has documented before it just won't do it. This also and particularly applies to code. Ask about Fibonacci? Great. Ask about something tricky? Let's make up some APIs
  - DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
    It’s oddly good at converting imperative C to Haskell, though.
  - Symbiote 2y ago
    There are hundreds of resources for a Google search for "emoji flags Windows".
  - nomel 2y ago
    Worse, the statistically frequent fibonacci-type problems are attractors in the latest space. If you ever get near them then snap, they'll degrade whatever answer you get that's not actually related, and it'll start throwing in fibonacci concepts into your non-fibonacci code.
- Philpax 2y ago
  fwiw, Claude gets this particular problem right https://gist.github.com/philpax/724633e106e3e3df4d5a83ba7bd228ff https://gist.github.com/philpax/724633e106e3e3df4d5a83ba7bd2...
- 1f60c 2y ago
  Did they even try? 3.6 Sonnet, R1, 4o, and o3-mini-high all correctly diagnosed the issue given the same basic prompt, albeit with varying levels of utility. Heck, even pasting the "prompt" into non-AI Google and Bing worked.
psychoslave 2y ago
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 flag, it's more dubious that most users would recognize the flag of the OIF. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Esperanto.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Esperanto.sv... https://isolatedtraveller.com/flag-of-organisation-internationale-de-la-francophonie/ https://isolatedtraveller.com/flag-of-organisation-internati...
- culi 2y ago
  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)
  - est 2y ago
    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)
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - culi 2y ago
      Now you are mixing up orthographies with languages
    - demetrius 2y ago
      > It's like Java and Scala both compiles to JVM bytecode. Not really, it's more like how both Castlian and Galician people write in Spanish. Spanish is not some magical byte-code that unifies Galician and Castilian. It's Castilian. Galicians just translate their language when they write in Spanish, while Castilians just write the way they speak. Similarly, Written Standard Chinese is not a bytecode, it’s written representation of Mandarin. Both Cantonese and Mandarin have words¹ 看 hon³/kan⁴ and 睇 tai²/di⁴. In Mandarin, the standard word for “to see” is 看 kan⁴. In Cantonese, it's 睇 tai². When Cantonese people replace 睇 tai² with 看 hon⁴ in writing, they *translate* their speech into Written Mandarin, while Mandarin speakers write the way they speak. > because the orthography movement failed in the 70s It's not a matter of orthography. 看 and 睇 are different both in Cantonese and Mandarin, it's not orthographic variant like “colour” and “color”. For example, in Mandarin, you can't replace 睇視 [睇视] di⁴shi⁴ with 看視 [看视] kan⁴shi⁴, they have different meaning and different reading. They're just different words¹. ____ ¹ Or morphemes. “What is a word” is a complex topic and not relevant here.
indulona 2y ago
yeah, i had to add svg icons to my frontend which takes a ton of space in the compiled project...for absolutely no good reason whatsoever.
xdennis 2y ago
Personally I prefer rendering country codes over flags because it allows me to spot and scold anyone who uses the flag of Chad to represent Romania (they look pretty much the same as emojis).
- 65 2y ago
  Can't forget Indonesia and Monaco!
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- extraduder_ire 2y ago
  Ivory Coast flag being used for Ireland is another common one, though easier to spot. I assume because it's listed first alphabetically. Doesn't help that most emoji fonts render all flags in the same aspect ratio.
bawolff 2y ago
Flag emoijis are a political nightmare. Who is a country? Who is an autonomous region? Which flag to use for disputed countries (e.g. do you use the taliban flag for afghanistan despite how much the western world doesn't like it). Not to mention people might not like the flag changing in their own messages after a take over. Imagine if russia wins the war in ukraine and all the patriotic ukrainians suddenly have the ukrainian flag in their old writings replaced with russian ones after a software update. Feels like something out of 1984.
- ivanjermakov 2y ago
  While I agree that there might be political concerns regarding national flag appearance, but Unicode clearly defines country codes and corresponding country names: https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-sequences.txt https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-sequences.txt
  - Kwpolska 2y ago
    And United Nations defines national borders, but countries disagree with that and complain to Microsoft, not the UN. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42823 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42...
    - bawolff 2y ago
      I don't think the UN really defines borders, its more what other countries recognize and various international law rules. At most the un security counil can declare a defacto change in border should not be recognized (usually to ensure that an act of agression isnt rewarded with territory) but its actually super rare for them to do that and they have only done it a few times
pentacent_hq 2y ago
Very helpful post! I was using flag emojis on a landing page and completely unaware that they weren't being rendered correctly on Windows. The author mentions a polyfill [1] and the fact that they dislike it's using a CDN. Fortunately, the polyfill can be configured to use a local/self-hosted font: > polyfillCountryFlags(fontName?: string, fontUrl?: string) Here's how I added it to my Astro landing page: https://github.com/pentacent/keila-web/commit/e96ec233eef631ed9ca2c64e9b3b27d1a1153484 https://github.com/pentacent/keila-web/commit/e96ec233eef631... [1] https://github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill https://github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill
ggm 2y ago
Found with related issues in work contexts that people can be very forgiving of baked-in things, and simply block on new entrants. If you ship android as-is from a GIT repo that has <forbidden thing> you can be ok. If you write an app or show slideware which refers to <forbidden thing> you are in the naughty corner for a while. It's because people who are responding are responding intelligently. They know what they can effect: the future. The past, is another country. They can't get the git repo to ban the <forbidden thing> but they can make your life hell for including it. So to an outsider this looks "inconsistent" but its (in my opinion) entirely internally consistent: Only act on things you can influence.
AraceliHarker 2y ago
Microsoft should adjust the flag font according to the language used, such as Simplified Chinese and Hebrew versions. However, Microsoft is not a company that respects the culture and language of each country. It has a bad habit of forcing what it decides in Redmond all over the world.
- justinclift 2y ago
  > Microsoft should adjust the flag font according to the language used ... That seems like it wouldn't work the way you're meaning in some pretty common cases. For example, with the Russian language.
- kccqzy 2y ago
  Both North Korea and South Korea use the Korean language. So when the language is set to the Korean language do you hide the North Korean flag or the South Korean flag?
bobsmooth 2y ago
When politics meets programming.
yieldcrv 2y ago
> 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 out” obviously I can’t relate to this in any way, but I could imagine it could occur the longer I live
- immibis 2y ago
  they still have a flag though. Tying the flag to the country code is controversial because you believe only countries should get country codes, but if they weren't limited to two characters, flag code TAIWAN is hopefully about as controversial as flag code RAINBOW or LASERKIWI or HARVARDSPORTSBALLTEAM. They're all kind of silly though. If you want an image use <img>...
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  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.
wkat4242 2y ago
> After doing more digging than I feel like I should have needed to, I found my answer: it appears that due to concerns about the fact that acknowledging the existence of certain countries can be perceived as a nominally political stance, Microsoft has opted to just avoid the issue altogether by not including country flag emojis in Windows’ system font. Sigh.. I'm so sick of companies pandering to bad regimes. This, google displaying the south china sea as part of china locally, meta dropping their DEI program after trump took over. None of the companies I know showing pride flags in Arab countries on their website during pride month (while of course widely proclaiming their support in PR and internal material everywhere else). It's all so fake. Stick by your values, then we stick by you as a customer.
skrebbel 2y ago
I'm the author of the country-flag-emoji-polyfill mentioned in the article. If the author reads this, maybe a correction is warranted: the polyfill doesn't actually depend on public CDNs. The library itself is a regular NPM package so you can install it locally and bundle it into your JS, and it takes a parameter "fontUrl" for when you prefer to self-host the font file. It only falls back to jsdelivr when no URL is specified. Nice writeup btw. I still can't get over how ridiculous it is that Windows doesn't have country flags emojis. It just means that every app/website ends up applying a hacky patch like this.
moebrowne 2y ago
What are the chances this is already being used to help fingerprint users...
vintagedave 2y ago
> although you’ll still be on the hook for downloading the entire 1.4MB font file I haven't tested with emojis (never thought of it, great test case!) but try Fontimize, which creates font subsets based on text your site actually uses. It runs over the HTML and CSS and creates an applicable subset. But the Python API supports passing just some specific text. Try using that, passing any and every flag you wish. You should be able to get a font file that contains just the country flags this way. I really need to get back to this library and add predefined subsets like, say, extended Latin, or country flags! https://github.com/vintagedave/Fontimize https://github.com/vintagedave/Fontimize
- notpushkin 2y ago
  That was my first thought, too! The article actually links to a polyfill which uses a subset font. Here’s the subsetting script it uses: https://github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill/blob/master/build/make-font.sh https://github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill/blob/m... Looks like the flags-only font is just 77 kb!
butz 2y ago
Flag emojis were not working on Edge for who knows how long, and nobody cared.
demetrius 2y ago
My biggest problem with flag emojis is that flags change, so the meaning of text encoded with Unicode changes. During the 2020 protests, Telegram changed large¹ BY emoji to the national white-red-white flag. Then it reverted the large emoji back to Łukašenka’s red-green flag. So, old conversations no longer have the same flag. These flags don't have the same meaning! They represent two very different visions of Belarus. I would really prefer if Unicode encoded flags with date of their acceptance. E.g. BY-1991 or BY-1918 for white-red-white, BY-1995 for red-green flag. _____________ ¹ Small emoji retained red-green flag even at that time. Also, Telegram has an option to replace large emoji with small emoji, so it was totally possible to send white-red-white flag and have it received as red-green flag, and vice versa.

288 points by gyanreyer 2y ago

Yep, 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.

Arbortheus 2y ago

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

jey 2y ago
You're not too far from the truth -- most mapping services render political boundaries differently based on where you're accessing the site from.
- strictnein 2y ago
  The Kashmir region north of New Delhi is an interesting example. Even in the US, Google basically says you're on your own, but here's a collection of dotted lines that may or may not be the actual borders.
- int_19h 2y ago
  Or just refuse to commit. E.g. Google Maps, to this day, will not show the country for any Crimean city when you click on it to bring up its info panel. If you do this with e.g. Kherson, you get "Kherson, Kherson Oblast, Ukraine". But if you do it with Sevastopol, you only get the city name, not the region & country. It also shows dotted borders between Crimea and both Russia and Ukraine.
  - IshKebab 2y ago
    Well... that kind of makes sense no? What do you think it should say?
    - LAC-Tech 2y ago
      I want maps to show reality. Not who they *think* should be in control of Taiwan or Transnistria, but who actually is.
      - lmm 2y ago
        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 move the border on the map. That would be pretty counterproductive.
        jim-jim-jim 2y ago
        > 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.
        lmm 2y ago
        It's the opposite of meaningless. Delegitimising wars of conquest massively reduced them and was a big part of why the 20th century was so much more peaceful on the whole (yes, even with the giant wars that did take place) than those before it.
        IshKebab 2y ago
        That's a very big and dubious claim! I'd like to see some evidence for that.
  - andix 2y ago
    Isn’t Google Maps blocked in Russia anyway? Crimea is a different story, as many countries recognize it to be in some kind of limbo and treat it as neither Russian nor Ukrainian. I think Yandex (Russian Google) removed borders completely from their maps. Also because it’s impossible to figure out where the Russian government would like them to be. Might change on a daily basis. Google maps added the „gulf of America“ to their US version, because anywhere else it’s still the Gulf of Mexico (even in iOS autocorrect, it changed it correctly to uppercase).
    - riffraff 2y ago
      the "gulf of america" thing is Google pandering to Trump, they originally had a policy of only using the popular name in a given locale. > if a ruler announced that henceforth the Pacific Ocean would be named after her mother, we would not add that placemark unless and until the name came into common usage. https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2008/04/how-google-determines-names-for-bodies.html https://publicpolicy.googleblog.com/2008/04/how-google-deter...
      - neuronexmachina 2y ago
        I think they mostly started with geolocation-dependent names in the early 2010s, e.g. Kashmir and Palestine.
        riffraff 2y ago
        that's different, they had location-dependent names at the time of this article too, the issue is specifically about the fact that even if you have location-dependent names you'd use the name that is commonly used in that location, not an arbitrary regulation name.
        owlninja 2y ago
        I thought they used the Geographic Names Information System (GNIS) from the USGS. If this buffoonery does pass, it will reflect in the government official data source - and thus on Google maps?
fweimer 2y ago
They removed country borders from the time zone selection in a Windows 95 update: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42823 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.
- LeoPanthera 2y ago
  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.
  - Kwpolska 2y ago
    Almost nothing, it scrolls horizontally to show the selected time zone in the middle.
    - canucker2016 2y ago
      Think of the dev/test/PM people who worked on this feature. It's not a standard Windows control, so there had to be lots of work to get the timezone boundaries, map to values usable for their world map bitmap, iterate a bit on the behaviour for when the user clicks at x,y on the map, et. al. The elation of shipping the minor feature, followed a few months later, with the realization that most of that work is going to be neutered.
  - jeroenhd 2y ago
    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.
SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
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.
andix 2y ago
It’s the reality of doing business all around the world. Either you chose sides, create different releases of software for some countries (deployment nightmare), or just remove such „sensitive“ features.
- immibis 2y ago
  BTW the USA is now one of these "sensitive countries" where apps have to lie to legally do business. Just like Chinese users see Taiwan labeled as China, American users see (or will soon see) the Gulf of Mexico labeled as the Gulf of America.
  - SllX 2y ago
    Two things: 1) Don’t lie. Apps don’t have to “lie” to do business in America. If someone labels the Gulf as the “Gulf of Mexico”, there’s not really a goddamn thing the Federal Government can do about it except throw a shit fit. The fullest extent that they can enforce this is on contractors making products and services specifically for the Federal Government’s and Military’s own use. 2) Maps apps are probably going to relabel it as the Gulf of America anyway within America, and it’s not exactly a lie. Barring any issue with Congress, if there’s some statute buried somewhere that legally enforces the name of the Gulf to be the Gulf of Mexico, it isn’t exactly a lie if the President exercising the authority of the Office of the President renames a geographical feature that’s at least partly touched by the US. There’s a lot of geographical features that have different names either in different languages, different locales or both, and it’s fully within the Executive branch’s purview to name them. They do so all the time, although typically for the more obscure things nowadays since for anything too prominent, the name was decided long ago. Maps apps can set their own policy on this, but generally the easiest course of action is to defer to governing authorities.
    - nottorp 2y ago
      So it's only bad when the Chinese or Russians do it? :)
      - 2y ago
wodenokoto 2y ago
I believe google maps have already implemented the Gulf of America for US users.
est 2y ago
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-google-maps-america-mckinley-denali/77990503007/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2025/01/28/gulf-mexico-g...

draw_down 2y ago

[dead]

B-Con 2y ago

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.

paulgb 2y ago
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.
- CamouflagedKiwi 2y ago
  I'm sure they do have a way of dealing with it in Bing Maps - I assume they can display borders differently depending on the country of origin (I think that's the common approach), but that has zero technological overlap with the presence or absence of Unicode flag codepoints in a system-level font.
- makeitdouble 2y ago
  Getting out of these issues as fast as they can could be the learning they got from these products.
aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> They didn't want to take a position on the N country disputes out there by deciding which country code gets which flag Why not simply collect all the prevalent "stances" on the disputed topics, and give the user to choose on each stance individually (or for a better user experience: create some presets of "stances that often occur together", which the user can use to activate multiple stances at once).
- mschuster91 2y ago
  Some of the target countries have laws on the books with teeth regarding their individual disputes.

hunter2_ 2y ago

> 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.

scrollaway 2y ago
Unicode doesn’t have codepoints for any of these. Unicode has defined a singular generic way to transform iso country codes (not even — just two of any characters), and says it’s how you do flags.
- rozab 2y ago
  No, unicode define the region subtags here https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/blob/maint/maint-41/common/validity/region.xml https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/blob/maint/maint-41/comm... You can see the country names alongside the codepoints here, ctrl+f for 'taiwan' and 'palestinian territories' https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-sequences.txt https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-sequences.txt
  - dgfitz 2y ago
    I welcome the day I can identify my home as a territory and have it legally recognized. Who exactly decides this, in the actual code?
    - 2y ago

tobr 2y ago

Since 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.

Y_Y 2y ago
But flags almost sometimes map roughly to languages within my limited experience! For example there's only one kind of English and it belongs to the USA. Also Spanish, that must be USA too, even if some unimportant countries speak it. Brazil can have Portuguese because I don't know where Angola is. The Indian flag can represent Hindi, but also the 22 scheduled languages, but not the other official language because I already allocated it. This is going pretty well, but seems tedious, so for all other cases let's just merge ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 and ISO 639-1 as follows: SELECT c.code AS common_code, c.country_name, l.language_name FROM iso_3166 c INNER JOIN iso_639 l ON c.code = l.code; And if they don't speak Afrikaans in Afghanistan or Arabic in Argentina then you'll have to take it up with the International Organization for Standardization.
- the_other 2y ago
  Nice. Even Japan (jp) and Japanese (ja) lose out with this.
- toolslive 2y ago
  So - for English, I'll use the Jamaican flag. - for Russian, I'll use the flag of South Ossetia. - for German, I'll use the flag of Austria. - for French, I'll use the Malinese Flag. - for Dutch, I'll use flag of Suriname. just see how happy people are with this ;)
  - ahoka 2y ago
    No, for English you should obviously use the flag of the largest country that uses it as an official language: India.
    - 2y ago

kccqzy 2y ago

> 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 Wait. I thought Windows has ClearType which could render black text on white background using colors. And furthermore there is a wizard to allow users to adjust how much ClearType adjustment there is. This feels like a totally incorrect solution. And apparently starting from 2021 Microsoft Edge did in fact begin to use ClearText according to this article https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2021/06/02/improving-font-rendering-in-microsoft-edge/ https://blogs.windows.com/msedgedev/2021/06/02/improving-fon... from Microsoft. So the author's approach would be broken in Microsoft Edge since 2021.

tobr 2y ago
The polyfill mentioned and linked in the article has a cleverer solution. It attempts to render the same flag emoji in two different text colors and checks if they end up being the same color or not (same color = probably a color glyph, ie an emoji). https://github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill/blob/527a3d121d2e198e733934a8b1007c819244e903/src/emoji.ts#L48 https://github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill/blob/5...
- skrebbel 2y ago
  (I'm the author of the polyfill, though note that all this code is pieced together from existing other libs with irrelevant parts removed; none of the good ideas are mine) Just randomly sharing, the part of the trick I like the most is that it renders the emojis scaled down to a 1x1 canvas, so it renders just a single pixel. That makes checking stuff like "am i not accidentally reading in the transparent area of the glyph" and stuff like that no problem, because the whole emoji is blurred down to a single pixel. The author's example is a bit weird in this regard, it does the same trick (set the canvas width and height to 1), and then it still loops through all 1 pixels and discards any transparent ones.
MatmaRex 2y ago
You're right, but the author's approach still works by accident, because ClearType is disabled when drawing text to canvas. I am not sure why that's the case, but I would guess it's because the subpixel colors can only be computed correctly when the background color is known (and static), and with a canvas, the background can be drawn later or animated. ClearType is only enabled for normal text on the page, and many CSS properties incidentally disable it presumably for similar reasons (e.g. 'will-change: opacity;').

slig 2y ago

Why are emojis tied to a OS font? The only reason I can think of is another way to force people to upgrade their OS, for instance, on macOS, even if your version was still supported, you wouldn't get the new emojis until you upgraded.

jagged-chisel 2y ago
…or install a font with support
cdrini 2y ago
Hmm I'm a bit confused by your question. Emojis are a Unicode range, and the only way Unicode is displayed on a monitor is through -- a font. So just like with text, if a website doesn't load it's own font, the OS-level fonts are used. I'm not sure what the alternative would be.
- slig 2y ago
  Sorry, I now see my question was poorly worded. I was ranting about OS vendors not updating emoji fonts on supported versions -- you have to upgrade to the latest major version to get new emojis. I ran into this issue twice when using an older, and supported, version of both macOS and Android.
  - kccqzy 2y ago
    It is definitely a strategy for Apple to increase uptake of their non x.0 releases.

danjl 2y ago

Does this problem disappear if you specify your own font for your site, like Roboto?

TonyTrapp 2y ago
If the font contains the missing emojis, sure. Emoji fonts tend to be huge though. The base Roboto font doesn't contain the emojis IIRC, there's a separate Roboto Emoji font for this reason (it's several dozen MBs).
qingcharles 2y ago
You can also do like a lot of major sites and just identify the codepoints and replace them with images as a kludge. I think Twitter does this since Elon thought the water gun emoji was too "woke".
- gruez 2y ago
  >think Twitter does this since Elon thought the water gun emoji was too "woke". Funny you say that, considering it originally was an actual gun, then companies progressively changed it to a water gun until it was the defacto standard. I guess if something got changed for "woke" reasons, and it sticks around long enough, you can dunk on the guy changing it back for being "anti-woke"?

josephcsible 2y ago

I don't get why Google doesn't want to ship them with Chrome, since they're not taking any more of a political stance by doing so than they are by shipping them with Android.

0x073 2y ago
Firefox has an custom cert management. Chrome relies on the os certs. I think that's the correct way how software should works.
- ziddoap 2y ago
  Chrome runs a root program, and has for a few years. >Standardizing the set of CAs trusted by Chrome across platforms through the transition to the Chrome Root Store, coupled with a consistent certificate verification experience through the use of the Chrome Certificate Verifier, will result in more consistent user and developer experiences. https://blog.chromium.org/2022/09/announcing-launch-of-chrome-root-program.html https://blog.chromium.org/2022/09/announcing-launch-of-chrom...
GuB-42 2y ago
My idea is that an app should do its best to work with the OS and not override defaults, that includes system fonts. It is good for consistency, accessibility, etc... If Windows doesn't ship with flag emoji, or any character for that matter, that shouldn't be Chrome's problem. Android is an OS, Google is responsible of it, so they get to decide what goes in their fonts.
- echoangle 2y ago
  By that argument, they shouldn't override the OS trust store either, but most browsers do. There's a compromise between consistency and user friendliness.
  - GuB-42 2y ago
    Chrome doesn't override the OS trust store, Firefox does.

fsckboy 2y ago

yes, we know, there are historical territorial disputes all over the world. But can somebody here make a case that this is not actually/solely to appease China (over Taiwan presumably)?

mjr00 2y ago
If the essence of your question is "are there US-aligned/non-China countries who would have issues about certain flags", the answer is yes. Good example: the flag for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, aka North Korea. The Western world acknowledges North Korea as a separate entity. South Korea does not and considers the North part of its territory. They wouldn't be too happy about a NK flag on their operating system giving legitimacy to the state.
- fsckboy 2y ago
  no, (a) that's not the essence of my question and (b) I was not asking the essence of my question, I was asking literally my question. Microsoft would not respond to North Korea by deleting all the unicode flags all over the world, so while that might get you closer to the essence of your question, there's no point in me asking my question if you are just going to dodge it.
  - mjr00 2y ago
    Your question was > can somebody here make a case that this is not actually/solely to appease China (over Taiwan presumably)? I gave one (of many) examples where this would be relevant for a country other than China. If you don't think South Korea is politically important enough to matter, then use the Israel/Palestinian flag situation as something that certainly is. Or more simply: no, this is not just because of China and Taiwan.
    - fsckboy 2y ago
      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.

Jotalea 2y ago

> Out of desperation I asked ChatGPT. It was useless as usual. This is so real.

sureIy 2y ago
I hold the belief that if you ask it something that nobody has documented before it just won't do it. This also and particularly applies to code. Ask about Fibonacci? Great. Ask about something tricky? Let's make up some APIs
- DaiPlusPlus 2y ago
  It’s oddly good at converting imperative C to Haskell, though.
- Symbiote 2y ago
  There are hundreds of resources for a Google search for "emoji flags Windows".
- nomel 2y ago
  Worse, the statistically frequent fibonacci-type problems are attractors in the latest space. If you ever get near them then snap, they'll degrade whatever answer you get that's not actually related, and it'll start throwing in fibonacci concepts into your non-fibonacci code.
Philpax 2y ago
fwiw, Claude gets this particular problem right https://gist.github.com/philpax/724633e106e3e3df4d5a83ba7bd228ff https://gist.github.com/philpax/724633e106e3e3df4d5a83ba7bd2...
1f60c 2y ago
Did they even try? 3.6 Sonnet, R1, 4o, and o3-mini-high all correctly diagnosed the issue given the same basic prompt, albeit with varying levels of utility. Heck, even pasting the "prompt" into non-AI Google and Bing worked.

psychoslave 2y ago

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 flag, it's more dubious that most users would recognize the flag of the OIF. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Esperanto.svg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Esperanto.sv... https://isolatedtraveller.com/flag-of-organisation-internationale-de-la-francophonie/ https://isolatedtraveller.com/flag-of-organisation-internati...

culi 2y ago
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)
- est 2y ago
  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)
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - culi 2y ago
    Now you are mixing up orthographies with languages
  - demetrius 2y ago
    > It's like Java and Scala both compiles to JVM bytecode. Not really, it's more like how both Castlian and Galician people write in Spanish. Spanish is not some magical byte-code that unifies Galician and Castilian. It's Castilian. Galicians just translate their language when they write in Spanish, while Castilians just write the way they speak. Similarly, Written Standard Chinese is not a bytecode, it’s written representation of Mandarin. Both Cantonese and Mandarin have words¹ 看 hon³/kan⁴ and 睇 tai²/di⁴. In Mandarin, the standard word for “to see” is 看 kan⁴. In Cantonese, it's 睇 tai². When Cantonese people replace 睇 tai² with 看 hon⁴ in writing, they *translate* their speech into Written Mandarin, while Mandarin speakers write the way they speak. > because the orthography movement failed in the 70s It's not a matter of orthography. 看 and 睇 are different both in Cantonese and Mandarin, it's not orthographic variant like “colour” and “color”. For example, in Mandarin, you can't replace 睇視 [睇视] di⁴shi⁴ with 看視 [看视] kan⁴shi⁴, they have different meaning and different reading. They're just different words¹. ____ ¹ Or morphemes. “What is a word” is a complex topic and not relevant here.

indulona 2y ago

yeah, i had to add svg icons to my frontend which takes a ton of space in the compiled project...for absolutely no good reason whatsoever.

xdennis 2y ago

Personally I prefer rendering country codes over flags because it allows me to spot and scold anyone who uses the flag of Chad to represent Romania (they look pretty much the same as emojis).

65 2y ago
Can't forget Indonesia and Monaco!
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
extraduder_ire 2y ago
Ivory Coast flag being used for Ireland is another common one, though easier to spot. I assume because it's listed first alphabetically. Doesn't help that most emoji fonts render all flags in the same aspect ratio.

bawolff 2y ago

Flag emoijis are a political nightmare. Who is a country? Who is an autonomous region? Which flag to use for disputed countries (e.g. do you use the taliban flag for afghanistan despite how much the western world doesn't like it). Not to mention people might not like the flag changing in their own messages after a take over. Imagine if russia wins the war in ukraine and all the patriotic ukrainians suddenly have the ukrainian flag in their old writings replaced with russian ones after a software update. Feels like something out of 1984.

ivanjermakov 2y ago
While I agree that there might be political concerns regarding national flag appearance, but Unicode clearly defines country codes and corresponding country names: https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-sequences.txt https://unicode.org/Public/emoji/latest/emoji-sequences.txt
- Kwpolska 2y ago
  And United Nations defines national borders, but countries disagree with that and complain to Microsoft, not the UN. https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42823 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20030822-00/?p=42...
  - bawolff 2y ago
    I don't think the UN really defines borders, its more what other countries recognize and various international law rules. At most the un security counil can declare a defacto change in border should not be recognized (usually to ensure that an act of agression isnt rewarded with territory) but its actually super rare for them to do that and they have only done it a few times

pentacent_hq 2y ago

Very helpful post! I was using flag emojis on a landing page and completely unaware that they weren't being rendered correctly on Windows. The author mentions a polyfill [1] and the fact that they dislike it's using a CDN. Fortunately, the polyfill can be configured to use a local/self-hosted font: > polyfillCountryFlags(fontName?: string, fontUrl?: string) Here's how I added it to my Astro landing page: https://github.com/pentacent/keila-web/commit/e96ec233eef631ed9ca2c64e9b3b27d1a1153484 https://github.com/pentacent/keila-web/commit/e96ec233eef631... [1] https://github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill https://github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill

ggm 2y ago

Found with related issues in work contexts that people can be very forgiving of baked-in things, and simply block on new entrants. If you ship android as-is from a GIT repo that has <forbidden thing> you can be ok. If you write an app or show slideware which refers to <forbidden thing> you are in the naughty corner for a while. It's because people who are responding are responding intelligently. They know what they can effect: the future. The past, is another country. They can't get the git repo to ban the <forbidden thing> but they can make your life hell for including it. So to an outsider this looks "inconsistent" but its (in my opinion) entirely internally consistent: Only act on things you can influence.

AraceliHarker 2y ago

Microsoft should adjust the flag font according to the language used, such as Simplified Chinese and Hebrew versions. However, Microsoft is not a company that respects the culture and language of each country. It has a bad habit of forcing what it decides in Redmond all over the world.

justinclift 2y ago
> Microsoft should adjust the flag font according to the language used ... That seems like it wouldn't work the way you're meaning in some pretty common cases. For example, with the Russian language.
kccqzy 2y ago
Both North Korea and South Korea use the Korean language. So when the language is set to the Korean language do you hide the North Korean flag or the South Korean flag?

bobsmooth 2y ago

When politics meets programming.

yieldcrv 2y ago

> 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 out” obviously I can’t relate to this in any way, but I could imagine it could occur the longer I live

immibis 2y ago
they still have a flag though. Tying the flag to the country code is controversial because you believe only countries should get country codes, but if they weren't limited to two characters, flag code TAIWAN is hopefully about as controversial as flag code RAINBOW or LASERKIWI or HARVARDSPORTSBALLTEAM. They're all kind of silly though. If you want an image use <img>...
makeitdouble 2y ago
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.

wkat4242 2y ago

> After doing more digging than I feel like I should have needed to, I found my answer: it appears that due to concerns about the fact that acknowledging the existence of certain countries can be perceived as a nominally political stance, Microsoft has opted to just avoid the issue altogether by not including country flag emojis in Windows’ system font. Sigh.. I'm so sick of companies pandering to bad regimes. This, google displaying the south china sea as part of china locally, meta dropping their DEI program after trump took over. None of the companies I know showing pride flags in Arab countries on their website during pride month (while of course widely proclaiming their support in PR and internal material everywhere else). It's all so fake. Stick by your values, then we stick by you as a customer.

skrebbel 2y ago

I'm the author of the country-flag-emoji-polyfill mentioned in the article. If the author reads this, maybe a correction is warranted: the polyfill doesn't actually depend on public CDNs. The library itself is a regular NPM package so you can install it locally and bundle it into your JS, and it takes a parameter "fontUrl" for when you prefer to self-host the font file. It only falls back to jsdelivr when no URL is specified. Nice writeup btw. I still can't get over how ridiculous it is that Windows doesn't have country flags emojis. It just means that every app/website ends up applying a hacky patch like this.

moebrowne 2y ago

What are the chances this is already being used to help fingerprint users...

vintagedave 2y ago

> although you’ll still be on the hook for downloading the entire 1.4MB font file I haven't tested with emojis (never thought of it, great test case!) but try Fontimize, which creates font subsets based on text your site actually uses. It runs over the HTML and CSS and creates an applicable subset. But the Python API supports passing just some specific text. Try using that, passing any and every flag you wish. You should be able to get a font file that contains just the country flags this way. I really need to get back to this library and add predefined subsets like, say, extended Latin, or country flags! https://github.com/vintagedave/Fontimize https://github.com/vintagedave/Fontimize

notpushkin 2y ago
That was my first thought, too! The article actually links to a polyfill which uses a subset font. Here’s the subsetting script it uses: https://github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill/blob/master/build/make-font.sh https://github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill/blob/m... Looks like the flags-only font is just 77 kb!

butz 2y ago

Flag emojis were not working on Edge for who knows how long, and nobody cared.

demetrius 2y ago

My biggest problem with flag emojis is that flags change, so the meaning of text encoded with Unicode changes. During the 2020 protests, Telegram changed large¹ BY emoji to the national white-red-white flag. Then it reverted the large emoji back to Łukašenka’s red-green flag. So, old conversations no longer have the same flag. These flags don't have the same meaning! They represent two very different visions of Belarus. I would really prefer if Unicode encoded flags with date of their acceptance. E.g. BY-1991 or BY-1918 for white-red-white, BY-1995 for red-green flag. _____________ ¹ Small emoji retained red-green flag even at that time. Also, Telegram has an option to replace large emoji with small emoji, so it was totally possible to send white-red-white flag and have it received as red-green flag, and vice versa.