Are smileys still a thing? It appears that emoji have replaced smileys in many contexts but especially on mobile devices. Emoji offer some advantages over smileys: there is an unlimited number of them, they come as images which means that they may use multiple colors, and they always take up the same space provided that you don't pick one of those oversized emojis for extra effects.

Google added a new experimental flag to Google Chrome Canary recently which adds Emoji access to the context menu. The flag is available for all desktop operating systems and Chrome OS but only Mac users may use the functionality yet.

All desktop users may enable the flag but it has an effect on Macintosh only right now. Here is how you enable the new Emoji context menu:

  1. Load chrome://flags/#enable-emoji-context-menu in the Chrome web browser. As mentioned previously, this is only in Chrome Canary at the time but it will become available in other versions of the browser later.
  2. Flip the status of the flag to enabled.
  3. Use the restart button to restart Chrome.

Mac users may right-click on text fields in the browser after the restart to display the new Emoji context menu option. A click on the context menu item displays the emoji context menu.

Experienced Mac users may notice that Macintosh systems support the keyboard shortcut Command-Control-Space to display the Emoji menu as well. Google Chrome makes the option available through the browser's context menu effectively.

Google plans to bring the feature to Windows and other desktop operating systems in the future. Windows 10 users who run the Fall Creators Update have access to an Emoji keyboard shortcut as well if the locale is set to EN-US. The keyboard shortcut is Windows-; (Windows and semicolon).

Third-party software like WinMoji adds similar functionality to all supported versions of the Windows operating system.

You can undo the change at any time by setting the flag mentioned above to disabled.

Closing Words

I'm not particularly excited about emoji support in browsers or operating systems but I can see that a lot of people use them. Google's following the market with the decision, I guess, and as long as it is not implemented in an intrusive way.