[Bug-gnuzilla] Emoji in IceCat

[Felix Fröhlich]

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Hi everyone,

I've been trying to work out how to get emoji and other symbols working
in IceCat 52.6.0 on Debian 9 but failed (mostly, see below).

What I tried is the following:

 * Because I installed IceCat via GNU Guix, I installed some fonts that
   are capable of displaying Emoji. In my case, that was the Guix
   package font-google-noto. It shows up when running fc-list.
 * To test if that sufficed to display Emoji, I went to the [Full Emoji
   List][1] by the Unicode Consortium (WARNING: opening may cause long
   loading times!) and noticed that a good number of the emoji listed
   in the "Browser" column were actually displayed. Inspecting those
   emoji via right mouse click → "Inspect Element" → "Fonts" in the
   pane on the right revealed that they were, indeed, using the font
   Noto Color Emoji (system). So far, so good.
 * Then I tried copying some of them (namely U+1F465 👥, U+1F3F7 🏷 and
   U+1F6E0 🛠) to the [searx instance I'm using][2], the address bar of
   IceCat and the post area on the [diaspora* pod I'm using][3]. In all
   three of these locations, the emoji show up as blank space. Also, in
   contrast to the Unicode page above, Noto Color Emoji does not show
   up as used font.
 * Modifying the fonts for Latin in about:preferences#content to Noto
   and prohibiting pages from choosing their own fonts didn't help,
   either.

I have some extensions installed that may interfere with fonts:

 * uBlock Origins: Remote fonts are enabled on all affected sites.
 * uMatrix: CSS is enabled everywhere.
 * NoScript: @font-face is allowed everywhere.
 * IceCatHome: Enabling/disabling the "Use system fonts" option doesn't
     change IceCat's ability to display Emoji, even after restarting.

Do you know of anything that I have missed and could check to see why
IceCat doesn't display Emoji unless on unicode.org?

Thanks in advance for any help you can provide!

 [1]: https://unicode.org/emoji/charts/full-emoji-list.html
 [2]: https://searx.ch/
 [3]: https://diasporing.ch/

- -- 
Felix Fröhlich
GnuPG: AC26CC3F517BA1794743512E32E7A8DAB442426F
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