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Comment by josephcsible | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

Chrome doesn't override the OS trust store, Firefox does.

Chrome launched their own root program a couple years ago: https://blog.chromium.org/2022/09/announcing-launch-of-chrom...

I'm not GP, but yes, IMO browsers shouldn't override the OS trust store (and shouldn't ship their own flag emojis).

You are a web browser, not an operating system. Stay in your lane.

A 1.4MB binary size cost is massive. I'm a chrome developer and our threshold for what you need to explain the cost/benefit of is 16KB.

To me this just isn't worth the cost.

Fwiw just the country flags are 77kb if you use the Twemoji ones like Firefox does. Fancy shiny ones area bit bigger I suspect.

Interesting. That's a lot more plausible. Reopened the bug.

Wow cool!

Sidenote, I'm the maintainer of the polyfill for this and its little script that extracts just the country flags from Mozilla's Twemoji font [0]. I'm not an expert by any stretch, but if it's in any way helpful that I chime into that Chromium bug then let me know. I'd love to deprecate the polyfill.

[0] https://github.com/talkjs/country-flag-emoji-polyfill/blob/m...

Sorry, but a Chrome developer complaining about 1.4MB being too "massive" is just the funniest thing ever! xD

google.com homepage

  59 requests 1.2 MB transferred 3.1 MB resources

The entire offline installer of over 15 years worth of features is 120 MB for Windows, it's quite impressive really considering the amount of features that includes. If they took the typical approach of web pages run in Chrome that might be multiple GB by now.

But this just means that numerous websites are going to offer different versions of that same 1.4Mb download to make it work for themselves.

Noto Color Emoji weighs more than 20 MB, which makes it difficult to embed to the browser. I think that's mainly due to the embedded PNGs so it would be technically possible to get rid of them and use vector fonts for special occasions, though. (In fact, I believe Firefox did so with its built-in Twemoji.)

They just need the flag glyphs, not everything else.

Those flag glyphs still have to be harmonized with other emoji glyphs anyway, so including all of them is the safest approach.

That's not essential. Plain looking flags are still better in all cases than large letters.

Firefox has an custom cert management.

Chrome relies on the os certs.

I think that's the correct way how software should works.

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-chrom...

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