Status of the old Windows 10 emoji?

[mindplay-dk]

This might be the wrong place to ask, but official Windows support channels generally are a dead end for these sorts of things.

Early reactions on the net to this new set of emoji has not been great - a lot of people are asking how to remove them and restore the old ones, and I would be one of those people.

It's not only a matter of personal taste (I'm an adult and I do not like the overly colorful children's cartoon vibe) but also a matter of communication - the emoji have become part of our written language, and the sudden, drastic change makes them very difficult to decode.

Switching emoji is not as simple as changing a font - letters are abstract symbols, they don't inherently resemble anything, so most people have an easier time abstracting from precisely what the characters look like. Changing the look of an emoji is very different and much more confusing, as these symbols actually illustrate real facial expressions and real-life objects.

Emoji work by mirroring our own facial expressions - imagine you looked in the mirror one day and suddenly your face looked different. Very confusing. It's obviously not that extreme, but we do to some extend mirror our selves in these graphics, and it is very confusing to wake up to Windows 11 one day and find you have to adapt to an entirely new visual language.

I'm sure these new emoji will be very popular with kids, who are generally more adaptable than adults - but for some (many) of us, this change (any change) is unnecessary, confusing and distracting, and we don't want them.

If you had introduced these new emoji as an option, how many do you think would have chosen the old ones?

Bottom line:

Please provide an option in Windows 11 to switch back to the old Windows 10 emoji.

(It's cool that you're building these new ones in the open, but I hope that doesn't mean the old ones go unmaintained.)

[inferno986return]

I would also like the old emoji set with the thick black outlines to be open-sourced. I really like the simple yet effective style they have :-)

[mindplay-dk]

To others looking to switch back to Win 10 emoji on Win 11, I don't recommend it.

I used these instructions and were able to switch back - unfortunately, it looks like the new font is ahead of the old in terms of having more emoji, and the emoji input dialog does not take this into account, so it will display little black squares for newer emoji not present in the old font. (Likewise, every app would display little black squares for newer, missing emoji.)

In other words, the Win 10 version of the emoji font isn't really compatible with the Windows 11 version of the emoji font, and likely isn't being maintained anymore, since they've made the decision to switch - my prediction is, we'll see a Windows 10 update soon that replaces the old emoji.

If the Win 10 emoji are now unmaintained and headed for retirement, I would suggest the following:

Provide an option to switch to Noto emoji, which are dual licensed under Apache 2.0 and SIL.

The option to switch would likely be really helpful to 2.8 billion Android users.