Coming your way in Chrome 98
Many of us dismissed emoji as a fad when they started to appear a few years back, but here we are in 2022 and emoji are increasingly the only way I want to communicate with people. Why say, “yes, I’ll look at that” when you can just send a goofy picture of eyes? Your emoji communication will be leveling up in Chrome 98, featuring crisper lines and smaller files sizes. You can check them out today in the new beta.
Take a look at the image above. The set on the left uses a new font format Google calls COLRv1, and the right uses traditional bitmap. Google designed the new format to support more powerful “glyph definitions” like gradients and transformations, and it can reuse existing contours for multiple individual emoji. The upshot is that emoji in COLRv1 look sharper than standard bitmaps. That’s clear in the example image.
COLRv1 scales to larger sizes, so emoji will look better on the web with large font sizes. Even with the higher quality, COLRv1 will make emoji much smallerāabout a fifth of the size while offering greater fidelity. COLRv1 will be available in Chrome 98 on both desktop and Android, which is now in beta. You can test it out using this demo created by the Chrome dev team. It should be included in the stable release of Chrome within a few weeks. Enjoy. š
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