Hacker News Reader

Chrome does its own text rendering and their font doesn't have characters for the emoji code points. There are a number of chrome extensions that add these characters. (Here's one: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chromoji-emoji-for...)

You can also use Safari on OS X.

I can sort of understand why a cross-platform browser engine might include its own text rendering engine, but is there any justification for it not making use of the fonts on the local machine to fill in the necessarily large holes in what fonts the browser bundles?

Win7/Chrome doesn't render it.. Outlook 2010 (rss reader) does :)

It appears in the favicon in the comments on chrome also

FWIW, the emoji character works fine in all contexts I've seen it: status bar URL hover, location bar and on HN and the Wikipedia web pages. This with OS X/FF 31.

Same on Windows 8.1 + Chrome

This is a problem in Chrome only. It renders fine in Firefox and Safari.